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THE VICTORIAN FBMNE FATALE; MIRROR OP THE DECADENT TEMPERAl-lENT

by JOSEPH CLAYBORNE NUNNALLY, B.A., M.A.

A DISSERTATION IN ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Technological College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved

Accepted

June, 1968 f 1 r-.

•'3

No. " Cop- ^

ACKNOVJIEDGEMENT

I am most grateful to Professor Roger L. Brooks for his direction of this dissertation and to the other members of my committee. Professors J. T. MoCullen and Floyd Eugene Eddleman, for their help, encouragement, and endless patience.

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD iii I. HOME AND HEARTH 1 II. PRE-RAPHAELITE LITERATURE • . 16 III. AESTHETIC LITERATURE 45 IV. CONCLUSION 75 V. A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 75

* * m Hi i^ FOREWORD

The Art for Art's Sake Movement in Victorian England began about mid-century V7ith the Pre-Raphaelites and con­ tinued on through the fin de si'e^cle. -Essentially, it v;as comprised of artists in revolt against the moral, esthetic, and cultural standards of the time, V.'hlle the writers and critics under its aegis did indeed oppose practically every­ thing "Victorian"—from current fashions to the mass pro­ duction of goods—my interest in the movement is confined largely to its literature: namely, its re;3ection of the stereotyped Victorian heroine (which will be explored in Chapter I) and the subsequent creation of a new, rather bizarre, feminine type. This new heroine—or anti-heroine—became the sub­ ject of countless Decadent productions, in literature as well as art. (It should be pointed out, here that in the following study I use the term "Decadent" in a generic sense. It applies to all artists of the Art for Art's Sake MoveiL^nt whose temperaments and works evince that love of the height­ ened sensory experience which Pater, VJilde, Symons,and others elevated to philosophical status.) Merciless, perverse, in­ capable of love, she will be designated here by a variety of titles: the femme fatale, la volupte. the demon-lover, and other synonyms.

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lly purpose, then, is threefold: first, to define and isolate the f6!--^e fatr.'^.e image (see pp. 18 ff. for the criteria by ;-:hich she is identified) ; second, to trace this motif through a variety of works and artists; and, third, to show the manner in which the femme fatale reflects the Decadent consciousness. Finally, it is perhaps worth mentioning that I will draw the majority of my illustrations of the fe^.^ia fatale motif from works that were widely read by the Victorian pub­ lic. Also, these examples will be selected from writers who, by representing as they do all divisions of the Art for Art's Sake Movement, testify not only to the popularity of the demon-lover concept, but emphasize as well how remarkably identical in nature these various presentations were. I will by no means cite all appropriate works any particular poet affords, for to do so would be to go on" interminably. By the sane token, I will exclude many of the less familiar writers altogether. I believe, however, sufficient evidence will be given to justify her importance as a mirror of the Decadent mood. 1

CHAPTER I

HOME AND HEARTH

The English proletariat .is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that-this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bour­ geoisie, —Priedrich Engels

In order to appreciate fully the degree of original­ ity, not to say rebelliousness, of the various artistic and literary "movements"—Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Symbo­ lism, or Decadence—which graced the last half of nineteenth- century England's belles-lettres, it seems to me essential to indicate, however briefly, the prevailing moral and aes­ thetic climate of the times: to describe, in other words, the Victorian norm against which these reactionary movements set themselves. For we in this century are accustomed to bow automatically to the right of the artist to express him­ self as he sees fit, even if the finished product strikes us personally as being somewhat vulgar or offensive. By and large, our society shuns rigidity and intransigence, espe­ cially in matters of what is art or what is not art, or what the artist should be allowed to do or what should be forbid­ den to him. To be offended in this day and time by any "work of art" Is to some extent, however small, proof of a lack of

Kv sophistication. Not so one hundred years ago. And it is necessary to understand what the whole Art for Art's Sake Movement in England was up against before much of its ef­ forts can be justly evaluated. By 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, England was indisputably the foremost manufacturing power in the world. English goods were carried on English ships to every part of the world. And barring occasional financial reces­ sions and "panics"—such as those which occurred in 18^8 and again in 1886—the nation's wealth and industrial might grew steadily throughout the century. Indeed, had Victoria been blessed with Coolidge's gift of phrase, she could very well have boasted throughout her long reign that "the business of Great Britain is business." The Industrial Revolution, which was in full swing by the year of the Exhibition, brought hitherto unprecedented luxuries to the country. Along with its triumphs, however, the Revolution ushered-in a new so­ ciety. No longer was the economy agrarian; it was now capi­ talistic. No longer was the center of wealth the pastoral estate; it was the factory and the mill. Consequently, no longer was the seat of real power (i.e., economic power) the landed aristocracy or the nobility. It fell instead to the city merchant and the entrepreneur. The day of the well- bred Gentleman was past; the day of the self-made business­ man—the Bounderbies and the Veneerings—was here: rv^-^siMWf''•'** 1

Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new. . . .^ By mid-century, Victorian England was pre-eminently a nation of the middle classes—"of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie." To be sure, thousands were subjected to a bone-grinding poverty deplor­ able to read about, but, by and large, the English citizenry gained a new affluence as the country became increasingly 2 industrialized. To say that the Victorian Era was dominated by the middle class is not automatically to condemn. Indeed, it was largely the virtues of the middle class—efficiency, stabil­ ity, sober practicality, and industry—which made nineteenth- century England the wealthiest country in Europe. But, by

1 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. Everyman's Library Edition (London, 1907), P. 5. Though Victorian laisser-faire capitalism was any­ thing but benevolent, the century saw sufficient salaries for even the lowest laborers. In 1840, for example, to sustain himself, his wife, and children, the laborer required about fourteen shillings a week. His average salary: eight shil­ lings. By 1875, the necessities of life could still be ob­ tained for approximately fifteen shillings. For the first time, the unskilled worker could expect to earn this much each week. Theoretically, then, even the most run-of-the- mill workman could support himself and his dependents without having to resort'to charity, begging, or hiring-out the mem­ bers of his family to supplement his income. See, Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (New York, 1953), p. 173. the same token (and more important to this paper), it was largely the failings of the bourgeoisie—sentimentality, narrow-mindedness, conformity, and garishness—which, es­ pecially during the latter half of the. century, alienated so many of the artists, intellectuals, and literati from the public. It is not surprising that the two most cherished ideals of the Victorian masses were the sanctity of the home and the purity of women, especially English women. Domes­ ticity was (at least in theory) the fountain of man's happi­ ness and the foundation of England's greatness. The eighteenth-century gentleman had his club—in which he found masculine camaraderie, unlimited supplies of ale, and an atmosphere so congenial to his corrupt nature that quite often he ignored his home to the extent of receiving at the club both his visitors and his correspondence. But the nineteenth-century man of substance saw things in a different light. The respectable husband was not to be found always loitering at his favorite club; nor, if he could afford it, would he be content with "living above the shop." Instead, he built a house in some "fashionable" section of the city, and it was here that he repaired at the end of a busy (but profitable) day, and here he could be found, surrounded by wife and children. Ruskin, who was so often critical of his time and its tastes, was in full accord with the Victorian tendency to apotheosize the Home: ... I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins; and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honorably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the place of their earthly abode, x^hich had seen, and seemed almost to sympathize in, all their honor, all their gladness, or their suffering—that this, with all the record it bore of them, and of all material things they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon—was to be swept away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no re­ spect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to be draiTn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the hearth and house to them; that all that they ever treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged doivn to the dust. I say that a good man would fear this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it to his father's house. I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples-- temples which we should hardly dare to injure. . . .-^ While Ruskin here stresses the importance of the house as a sacrosanct physical monument which holds the record of past lives, and which therefore deserves every care and attention, the Victorians saw the family hearth (along with the church altar) as the symbol of morality and English respectability. The virtues which the typical En­ glishman liked to believe he possessed were centered within the domestic framework, "Poor misguided foreigners," says James Laver, "in particular Frenchmen, might eat their meals

^"The Lamp of Memory," The Works of John Ruskin. ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderbum (London, 1903), VIII, 225-226. in restaurants or even spend long hours at cafe tables on the boulevards, but the Englishman had his home from which 4 ... he never wished to be separated. " VJhen the comfort­ able Victorian shopkeeper wished to fe.el himself superior to, say, his French counterpart, his criteria was not edu­ cation or intellect, but which was the better family man and provider, or which was the more moral and "respectable." No better illustration of the Englishman's regard for the domestic shrine, no better symbol of the era itself, can be found than the royal family. The virtues which so endeared Albert and Victoria to the masses—their lack of wasteful extravagance, their piety, their devotion to the family ideal (Victoria bore Albert nine children, and re­ mained, after his untimely death in l86l, the devoted widox^ until her own death in I9OI), and their impeccable morality as monarchs—are the very virtues which", a half century ear­ lier, earned for George IV such ridicule at the hands of a more aristocratic press and public.-^ Victoria, even in appearance, seemed to personify the temper of the time. Stout, matronly, assured, even complacent, it is difficult to imagine the rather stuffy-looking widow of Windsor ever

Manners and Morals in the Age of Optimism; 1848- 1914 (New York, 19^), p. 37. ^In The American Heritap:e. XI (June, I960), 18-20, are some vicious caricatures of George IV by James Gillray. having giggled at an off-color remark, or, for that matter, ever having admitted that such things as off-color remarks existed in the first place. To compare the court of Vic­ toria and Albert with its opposite number in.Paris under Napoleon III is to see that the first establishment was at heart more bourgeois than regal, more domestic than imperial. However laudable were Victoria and her Consort, it is char­ acteristic of the times that they were the most sober and proper ruling family in Europe—reflecting and also shaping the personality of the Victorian Age. Going hand in hand xsrith the Victorian worship of the domestic ideal is, as I have mentioned, the belief in, and insistence upon, the innocence of English womanhood. In the customs, laws, and literature of the time we see the Vic­ torian woman occupying a unique place: First of all, for the comfortable, prosperous busi­ nessman, the woman's place was in the home. As a wife, it was her duty .to bear children; as a mother, it was her duty to supervise their training and education, especially the

^•^QXi in their own time, the intellectuals adopted a condescending attitude toxmrds the Queen and Albert. In I872, I4ark Twain saw the Albert Memorial in London and wondered that such a magnificent monument could be merely for "a most excellent foreign gentleman who was a happy type of the Good, and the Kind, the Well-Meaning, the Mediocre, the Commonplace . . . ." See, Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard de Vote (New York, 1938), p. I38. 8 females; and as a daughter, it was her duty to stay there—to obey her parents and to observe with meticulous fidelity all the rules and restrictions of what the middle classes liked to call "propriety," In nineteenth-century England, young ladies were not supposed to be individuals. Books by the hundreds were written exclusively to show that if, for what­ ever reason, a young woman transgressed the conventional and proper behavior of her station, or defied parental authority, disaster and social contumely would certainly follow. By way of example, vre can look at Timothey East's The Evangeli­ cal Rambler (182^). One of countless such tomes, it incul­ cates, through a dialogue between the young Miss Orme and her admirable governess. Miss Holmes, the wisdom of obedience and modest deportment, and x^rarns against the dangers that await the innocent outside the home. In this case. Miss Holmes warns her questioning charge against the evils of attending the assembly-room (i.e., a public dance):

I do not expect to see such places deserted, as there are too many temptations presented to each sex within the assembly-room to make them unpopular in this age of degeneracy; but they are productive of so many evils, that I consider them essentially injurious to the morals of society. There is the expense which they incur, and the long train of evils which often follow. What costly dresses! what a profusion of useless ornaments must be purchased! beside the incidental items of expense, in going, and returning, and paying for the admission ticket. . . . And what is the consequence of this? The bills of tradesmen are often left undischarged—the claims of benevolence are rejected—and a habit of use­ less extravagance is formed, x^hich extends its destructive influence to other branches of domestic expenditure. But I have a still more serious objection to urge against such schemes of amusement;—the perilous risk which a female often runs. She goes, clad in a light attire— moves about in a warm room, and then suddenly exposes he.rself, without any adequate increase of cloathing ^sic/ to a cold and damp atmosphere, by which she often sacrifices her health, and sometimes, her life.*^ Thus, for one night's frivolity, the wages are possibly total financial ruin, loss of health, perhaps death—not to mention a more than likely seduction by "one of the leading fashionables of the scene." The Victorians' hyper-sensitivity to anything which remotely suggested sex or sensuousness led to some bizarre results. For instance, the word "legs" was taboo. Even when the topic under discussion was furniture, the more deli­ cate "limbs" was substituted, "Bosom" was always used in­ stead of "breast," even when referring to a fowl about to be eaten. Also forbidden in polite society was the phrase, ''going to bed." The genteel lady "retired to rest." The hue and cry against open railway carriages was not because of their lack, of comfort or the dangers which flying cinders afforded, but because in open carriages the wind might blow the skirts of the female passengers and expose an ankle to public view. Later in the century, a similar controversy arose over the propriety of cycling.

7 Quoted by George Levine, The Emergence of Victorian Consciousness (London, I967), p. 3^2. o I-lanners and Morals in the Ap:e of Optimism, pp. 40 ff, '^^W:^. "X .|

10 For all its silly extremes about proper terminology and the delicacy of the human psyche, the Victorian Age was an intensely masculine one. The authority of the male—as husband, father, and head of the household—was nearly ab­ solute. Women's rights were virtually non-existent. They, of course, could not vote. Moreover, all property was in the hands of the' husband. Any property which was hers be­ fore marriage became his immediately after the vows were said. Any money that she might earn after the marriage be­ came his—even if they were separated (divorce requiring, literally, an act of Parliament). And, finally, even the money which she carried in her purse was legally his. No wonder, then, that the Victorian woman became something of a doll, a pretty plaything, and her husband's most prized possession. Towards the close of the century, a sophisti­ cated Oxonian, Max Beerbohn, would look-back at his father's day and write: "They ^the young women/ knew no reserve in the first days of the Victorian era. No thought was held too trivial, no emotion too silly, to express. ... By men they seem not to have been feared nor loved, but regarded rather as 'dear little creatures' or 'wonderful little beings,' and in their relation to life as foolish and inef- 9 fectual as the landscape they did in water-colour." They

9 "A Defense of Cosmetics," The Yellow Book. I (April, 1894), 69. Till ^'samimm^ti^wmmm,.w>ii

11 were sheltered, pampered, and protected like so many prin­ cesses, carefully insulated from reality and prevented from the responsibilities of life. Domestic duties, charity work, formal calls, and like occupations constituted their day. In short, they were encouraged by the masculine half of so­ ciety to be and to act like delicate pieces of porcelain. "Thus it was supposed that physical delicacy was interesting; that feminine virtues included physical weakness, mental in­ capacity, and universal ignorance; nature and the laws of nature were ignored; . . . she scorned the ruder delights that please the baser soul; /and/ eating was abhorrent to her." Needless to say, the literature of the time reflects the taste—or lack of it—and sensibilities of the middle class public. Especially in the novel—but in most of the poetry as well—do we find the writers'-observing the punc­ tilio demanded by the vast majority of readers. Thackeray boasted that nothing he had written had ever brought "a blush to the cheek of innocence"; Trollope looked back on a lifetime spent in writing novels and, with evident self- satisfaction, claimed: "I do believe that no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was

Walter Bessant, London in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1909)r P. l6. 12 before." Dickens' unrivaled popularity lay in his uncanny ability to fathom the minds and hearts of his audience and in his never transgressing the limits of "decorum." When he flailed away at the cruelties and inj[ustices of England, he was careful to cover the hard truths with an irresistible icing of sentiment, sentimentality, humor, appealing char­ acterizations, aind touching scenes of domestic life. What has been said of Chopin's compositions can be said of Dickens' novels: they are cannon hidden among' flowers. Though Dickens delighted in the eccentric characteri­ zation—Thomas Gradgrind, Mr. Choakumchild, Betsey Trotwood, Mr. Dick, and so on—his David Copperfield (18^9) shows us, in Dora, a perfect synthesis of the Victorian heroine. She is pretty, innocent, kind, and without any moral stain or blemish. Also she is without any real emotions. She loves, but it is a child-like love from one who is "like a pretty toy or plaything. "1 3-^ Like her counterparts in thousands of English families, Dora is the epitome of helplessness and

•^"^See, D. S.R. Welland, The Pre-Raphaelites in Litera­ ture and Art (London, 1953), PP. 28 ff. 12 Characteristic of Dickens' novels is Oliver Twist (1838). While he sets the novel in the underworld of London's slums and while he shows the horrible conditions of its flotsam of humanity, he never becomes so frank that he de­ scribes the pathetic Nancy for what she v:as: a prostitute. •^^David Copperf ield „ Heritage Edition (New York, 1937), P. 52^7" tH

13 naivete. When David attempts to teach her to keep the house­ hold accounts in a cooking book, she becomes-hopelessly lost: "But the cookery-book made 'Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip /her do^/ all over the tablets" (p. 563). Her reaction to any sort of practical instruction was the same: "My pretty little Dora's face x^ould fall," says David, "and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss" (pp. 563-56^), Like the ideal middle-class maiden, she is naive, virtuous, and incapable of any evil higher than occasionally spanking her lap dog. Most of all, she is subservient to, and utterly dependent upon, the male. (It is not coincidence that, as Laver notes, "the new 'clinging vine' ideal for women was essentially a middle-class phenomenon."^ )

As could be expected for the Victorian bourgeoisie, the word "love" meant an ennobling, passionless (or, rather, passionate only within the bounds of Puritan good-taste), and blissful emotion. Coventry Patmore, for example, en­ joyed enormous popularity as the poet of marriage and domes­ tic tranquility. His panegyric poem to his late wife, Anp:el in the House (1862), continued to be a best-selling gift

Manners and Morals., p. 38. fTI-Jgri.-. 1»^JW

1^ book well into the twentieth "century. One rather lengthy poem of his, "The Lovers," deserves to be quoted in full. It is not only typical of Patmore, but it is also represen­ tative of the norm in Victorian love poetry. To notice Patmore's presentation of the nature of love and its up­ lifting effect upon the speaker, the qualities he lavishes upon the feminine subject, the type of feelings and senti­ ments expressed by the poet-speaker (as well as what is left unsaid), and the general tone of the piece is to gain a sig­ nificant insight into just how great a polarity existed be­ tween the conventional Victorian product and many of the works we will later consider: He meets, by heavenly chance express. The destined maid; some hidden hand Unveils to him that loveliness Which others cannot understand. His merits in her presence grow. To match the promise in her eyes. And round her happy footsteps blow The authentic airs of Paradise. For joy of her he cannot sleep; Her beauty haunts him all the night; It melts his heart, it makes him weep For x-jonder, worship, and delight. 0 paradox of love, he longs. Most humble, when he most aspires. To suffer scorn and cruel wrongs From her he honors and desires. Her graces make him rich, and ask No guerdon; this imperial style Affronts him; he disdains to bask. The pensioner of her priceless smile. He prays for some hard thing to do. Some work of fame and labor immense. To stretch the languid bulk and thew Of love's fresh-born magnipotence. No smallest boon were bought too dear. Though bartered for his lovesick life; 15 Yet trusts he, with undaunted cheer, To vanquish heaven, and call her Wife. He notes how queens of sweetness still Neglect their crox'ms, and stoop to mate; How, self-consigned with lavish x«7ill. They ask but love proportionate; How swift pursuit by small d.egrees. Love's tactic, works like "miracle; How valor, clothed in courtesies. Brings dovm the loftiest citadel; And therefore, though he merits not To kiss the braid upon her skirt. His hope discouraged ne'er a jot. Outsoars all possible desert.^5 "The Lovers" was written by hundreds of different poets and printed under thousands of different titles throughout the century. It never lost its popularity with the public; but, beginning in the 'sixties, a vociferous attack against everything "The Lovers" stood for and sug­ gested was mounted by a group of Oxonians rich in both talent and gall.

The Poems of Coventry Patmore, ed. Frederick Page (London, 1959*) r PP. 77-78. \ES-'

CHAPTER II

PRE-RAPHAELITE LITERATURE . . . and they shall praise me, and say 'She hath all time as all we. have our day. Shall she not live and haVe her will'—even I? Yea, though thou diest, I say I shall not die. For these shall give me of their souls, shall give Life, and the days and loves wherewith I live. Shall quicken me with loving, fill with breath. Save me and serve me, strive for me with death. —Algernon Swinburne The term "Pre-Raphaelite" or "Pre-Raphaelite Brother­ hood" has come to embrace a fairly large number of mid- Victorian artists and poets. Among the better known are: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Algernon Swinburne. There are many others besides these who, for one reason or another, are described as Pre- Raphaelite.-^" Specifically, however, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 18^8 by three painters: D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. Soon it included two other artists: F. G. Stephens and James Collin- son. On New Year's Day, I850, the first issue of the now famous periodical. The Germ, was published. After struggling

In his study of Pre-Raphaelitism, The Victorian Romantics; 1850-1870 (London, 1929), T. Earle Welby in­ cludes Simeon Solomon, W. H. Deverell, A. E. W. O'Shaughnessy, Frederick Sandys, and William and Christina Rossetti.

16 17 through three subsequent issues, the magazine folded. The Brotherhood—the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—ex­ pired in 1853. (While both Hunt and Millais would become successful artists, they eschewed the more "fleshly" side of Pre-Raphaelitism and would eventually come to repudiate the bohemian Rossetti.) In I857, the Brotherhood was re­ vived at Oxford—again around the extraordinary personality of Dante Rossetti. This time, hoxsrever, with William Morris and Algernon Swinburne among the group, its literary side assumed a new importance. It became, says Starkie, "the first manifestation of the Art for Art's Sake School" in England.^ Though Rossetti's The Germ and William Morris' Oxford and Cambridge I4ap:azine (I856) contained many of the Pre-Raphaelites' best poetry, their paintings attracted much more attention during the 'fifties than did their writings.^^ But with the publication of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads in 1866, William Morris' The Earthly Paradise in I869, Rossetti's Poems and Arthur O'Shaughnessy's The Epic of Women

^Enid Starkie, From Gautier to Eliot (London, i960), P. 31. 18 For example, one of the most vehement and vitriolic attacks ever made against the Pre-Raphaelite-s, Robert Bu­ chanan's "The Fleshly School of Poetry," was first published in The Contemporary Review in I87I—fully tx\renty-one years after the first issue of The Germ. As painters, however, they had long since been recognized. msm^fm? •''*«.»

18 in 1870, they became as famous, or as infamous, for their poetry as for their canvases. To varying degrees, all of these xforks contained thematic treatments of an especial type of woman, one who was soon to be designated by a variety of titles: the carnivorous woman, the femme fatale, la femme sterile, our lady of pain, la volupte. the dark Venus, and a host of similar appellations. As merciless as she was se­ ductive, as cruel as she was beautiful, she became an irre­ sistible symbol for, first, the Pre-Raphaelites, then, later, the Aesthetes. Perhaps more than most of his contemporaries, Swin­ burne returned again and again to the theme of the destruc­ tive, soulless female—one "in whom the pride of life with its companion lusts, is inoamate. In her lover's half-shut eyes," he continues, "her fierce unchaste beauty is trans­ figured, her cruel sensual eyes have a meaning and a message; there are memories and secrets in the kisses of her lips. She is the darker Venus, fed with burnt-offering and blood- sacrifice; the veiled image of that pleasure which men im­ pelled by satiety and perverted by power have sought through ways as strange as Nero's before and since his time; the daughter of lust and death, and holding both her parents. 19 . , ." ^ Incapable of love, she destroys through her passions

19 "Notes on Poems and Reviews," 1866. See The Com­ plete V^orks of Algernon Charles Swinburne. ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (London, I925), XVI, 361. iar^i'c mwi

19 Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour; The heavy white limbs, and the cruel Red mouth like a venomous flower; Seven sorroxTs the priest give their Virgin; But thy sins, which are seventy times seven. Seven ages would fail thee to purge in. And then they would haunt thee in heaven: Fierce midnights and famishing morrows. And the loves that complete and control All the joys of the flesh, all the sorrows That wear out the soul.^^ Finally, she has about her an aura of the supernatural. Her merciless nature and irresistible beauty transcend the mun­ dane restrictions of birth and death. About her is a time- lessness which links her directly with her fatal sisters of antiquity (who themselves often become subjects for paint­ ings and poetry): Helen of Troy, Salome, Lilith, Eve, Pan­ dora, Iseult, and so on, ad infinitum. One of the most vil- lified pieces in Poems and Ballads V7as "Paustine. " Of this Work, Swinburne wrote the following: Faustine is the reverie of a man gazing on the bitter and vicious loveliness of a face . , . and dreaming of past lives in which this fair face may have held a no­ bler or fitter station; the imperial profile may have been Faustina's /the licentious wife of the Roman Em­ peror Antonius/f the thirsty lips a I^Iaenad's, when first she learnt to drink blood or wine, to waste the loves and ruin the lives of men; through Greece and again through Rome she may have passed with the same face which now comes before us dishonored and discrox^med.

20 "Dolores." Swinburne, Complete VIorks. I, 28^. Subsequent pagination x-rill be according to this edition and included within the text. 20 VJhatever of merit or demerit there may be in the verses, the idea that gives them such life as they have is sim­ ple enough; the transmigration of a single soul, doomed as though by accident from the first to all evil and no good, through many ages and forms, but clad alvrays in the same type of fleshly beauty. The chance which sug­ gested to me this poem was . . . the sudden sight of a living face which recalled the well-known likeness of another dead for centuries: in this instance, the noble and faultless 57P® ^^ "^'^® elder Faustina, as seen in coin and bust.^ And Faustine? Wine and rank poison, mild and blood. Being mixed therein Since first the devil threw dice with God For you, Faustine. Your naked new-born soul, their stake. Stood blind between; God said "let him that wins her take And keep Faustine."

You have the face that suits a woman For her soul's screen— The sort of beauty that's called human In hell, Faustine. You could do all things but be good Or chaste of mien; And that you would not if you could We know, Paustine. (I, 238-239) Besides "Faustine," a quick check of the verses in Poems and Ballads shows that approximately two-thirds of the book has the femTuft fatale and the destructive power of woman's beauty as its theme. One poem, "The Masque of Queen Bersabe," is devoted to describing the sins of twenty-four

2.1.•^"Note s on Poems and Reviews," 1866. Works. XVI, 36^-365. KUt',

21 ancient queens—queens like Cleopatra (whom Swinburne was later to write about at more length), Myrrha, Atarah, Abihail, and Herodias . . , those who were most "fair and foul."

At this point in defining the feminine predators, we would do well to abandon poetry for a time and turn to fiction. In the 'sixties, Swinburne was at the height of his creative powers. And during this period he wrote two novels: Love's Cross Currents in 1862 (published in I877) and the uncompleted Lesbia Brandon in I865 (published finally in 1952). Besides these two novels, and dating from the same time, are two additional prose fragments which are early versions of the books: Reginald Harex^rood and Herbert Winwood. "They all deal," says Edmund Wilson, "though the names sometimes vary, with more or less the same set of •characters, about whom . . . Swinburne was projecting a cycle."^^ Both. Lesbia Brandon and Love's Cross Currents are set in mid-nineteenth century England, Also, both deal with the same themes: adultery, incest, masochism, sapphic love, sadism, and familial intrigue. For my purpose, however, Swinburne's characterizations rather than his bizarre plots are what is important.

22 See Edmund Wilson's Introduction to The Novels of A. C. Swinburne (New York, I962), p. 22. »• •-r. ^-'B . .F. Wl

22 The. "heroine" of Lesbia Brandon. 1-Iargaret Wariston (wife of Lord Wariston of Ensdon Manor and sister of the twelve-year-old Herbert Seyton) is one of the best illustra­ tions we have of la_ volupte. Swinburne,devotes the opening pages to a minute, description of her sensuous, Pre-Raphaelite beauty. Her eyes had the "effect of deep blue and dark grey mixed. . . . The iris h^d fine fibers of light and tender notes of colour that gave the effect of shadow. , . . The pupil was not over large, and seemed as the light touched it of molten purple or of black velvet." Her lashes "were of golden brown, long and full; their really soft shade of colour seemed dark on a skin of white rose-leaves, between a double golden flame of eyes and hair. " Her nose "x^as straight and fine; . . . the division of the nostrils below a thought too curved and deep, but their shell exquisite in •cutting and colour." Her cheeks "were perfect in form, pale, but capable of soft heat- . . . as if the skin were suddenly inlaid with the petals of a young rose from the loxffest rip­ ples of the springing hair to the fresh firm chin, round and clear as fruit, planted as with tender care above a long large throat, deeply white and delicately full." Her ears "like the nostrils were models of fine grace, carved and curved to perfection." Her lips "were small and shapely, not scarlet but a shade brighter than purple or crimson leaves; a mouth that could suffer and allure, capable beyond ^F.'if:

23 others of languor and laughter." Her body was tall and slender, her arms and hands "full and frank, exquisitely attached; the shoulders fruitful and round as the breast, the hands narrow and long, palms and fingers coloured with rose and pearl." Her hair was golden, long and luxurious— rippling "from the roots" and "elastic in the rebellious undulation of the curls." Last of all, "her complexion and skin /were/ so thin and fair that it glittered against the light as white silk does, taking sharper and fainter tones of white that shone and melted into each other." So deli­ cately pale was she that her temples were "threaded through 23 with visible veins." Her eerie beauty notwithstanding, Margaret is as cold and unfeeling as a vampire. "... emotion was wanting to her. . . . Of one thing only she never thought;- of love. .This emotion had never yet even grazed her in passing. . . . For her children even had no hold on her" (p. 269). Even Denham, her half-brother and eventual lover, marvels at her coldness—at "the glory and terror of her beauty" (p. 225). Ceaselessly tormented by "her godlike beauty," which is "as

23Sinc e Lesbia Brandon is not included in Swinburne's Complete Works. I will document both novels and prose pas­ sages according to the edition cited in the preceding foot­ note: Lesbia Brandon, p. 290, Also, subsequent pagination will be included within the text. 2ii blind and unmerciful as a god," Denham is ultimately brought by her to suicide.

Surrounding Margaret is a sense of sin, sensuality, and a kind of primeval power to destroy. Clearly Swinburne saw her as the descendant of the Marquise de Merteuil in Laclos' Les Liaisons Dan^ereuses. In a conversation about French literature, the cynical Lady Midhurst (who also ap­ pears in Love's Gross Currents) remarks about the amoral Marquise in this fashion: "'She is a Titaness, and fights heaven. . , . She is epical, the marquise, enormous; only you don't see it for the red heels and powder . . . /she/ has gods against her and men beneath; she is a Prometheus in petticoats, and might be put into Milton as the mother of sin and death. It takes all the weight of heaven to crush her, and I don't believe she was beaten at last'" (p. 254). Finally, Swinburne repeatedly associates Margaret— not only in the reader's mind, but in the minds of the other characters—with pagan antiquity. Physically, we are told, she seems the flesh and blood twin of the Venus of the Triune. To Herbert, who is in love with her himself before meeting Lesbia, Margaret seems at various times Helen of Troy, Eleotra, Clytemnestra, Circe, and Calypso. Denham comes to see himself as a fallen Ulysses, and Margaret as the irresistible, but fatal. Siren. And the sea itself— ^' 25 timeless, immortal, beautiful, deadly—is constantly used to reinforce the metaphor of I-Iargaret as the reincarnation of something beautiful and evil: "All cruelties and treach­ eries, all subtle appetites and violent secrets of the sea, were part of her divine nature, adorable and acceptable to her lovers. Why should the gods spare men? or she, a sure and visible goddess be merciful to meaner things?" (p. 198). Walking along the beach, Herbert and Denham, whose thoughts had been on Margaret, have this exchange: The boy flushed and flinched as Denham patted him. "I think they were right to put a lot of women in the sea: it's like a woman itself: the right place for sirens to come out of, and sing and kill people." "They stay on shore now mostly," said Denham: "but I don't iDiow that they do the less harm for that. There are worse things than drowning, I should think." "I shouldn't like to droxm, either," said Bertie. "It's beastly to feel the i:ater at one's throat when one can hardly swim a stroke further. I suppose it's their fingers that choke you." "I can't say; but I've no doubt their hands are strong enough; no doubt." "Do you think they x^ere really beautiful, or only looked?" "I think they were. ... " (pp. 211-212) The few extant pages of Reginald Harewood describe characters and situations which would subsequently become Lesbia Brandon. In this first attempt, I^largaret Is named Helen Harewood. "She was curiously beautiful; her features were clear, tender, regular; she had soft and subtle eyes, the shifting colour in them drowned and vague under heavy white eyelids and curled lashes. . . , The hair was 26 saffron-coloured, thick and sinuous, the neck large, polished and long" (p. 359). Again beauty is allied with evil: She x>ras by nature untender, thoughtful, subtly appre­ hensive, greedy of pleasure, curious of evil and good; had a cool sound head, a ready, rapid, flexible clever­ ness. There was a certain cruelty about her which never showed itself in a harsh or brutal way, but fed with a soft sensual relish on the sight or conceit of physical pain. . . . She v:as a mixture of tx-ro breeds: of a sen­ sual blood and quick nerves, but also of a steady judge­ ment and somewhat cold heart. At bottom she had no moral qualities at all, . . . (p. 359) Helen's indifference to all morality, her total lack of conscience, and her inability to feel any tender emotions whatsoever make her something other than human. Depending on one's point of view, she is either witch or goddess: Beyond the rule of habit she could see no rule in the world: that once removed by force or chance, she could not understand the existence of reason or right. She knew that murder for example was a theological sin, but. except for that technical prohibition she knew no reason against it. She had instinct of a sort, but not the instinct of moral repulsion, she could not disapprove anything except by rote. This character of mind was born with her and grex^ up quietly, as her body grevj in beauty, (p. 359) Even more explicitly than with I4argaret, Swinburne brings in the siren motif. During a terrible storm, Helen walks down to the sea's edge. Almost immediately, she sees a boat cap­ size some one hundred yards from shore. As her lover, Cham- preys, begins a life and death struggle to swim to land, Helen crawls atop a ledge; and "lying dovm and grasping the rims of rock, she stooped and peered upon the pale- coloured sea. . . . She knew he could swim x^rell enough. ^

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ON 00 jn crawled doT-rn n ihing her time, p 3 3 space betv7een CD fc the sxfinging B 5.nQ up the rock- i the look of o t •1 11 her face was Z2. '^ M o <-•• —» 3 a- ginald /her n> S o re n a orq S n n, but cap in &3 d kissed him, . 366) Venus that is CD

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24 Lesbia Bra.ndon (London, 1952), p. 281. 28 "She is sublime," says Lady Midhurst, "anything you like; but she is not wholesome" (p. 90). And when, a few lines farther, she compares Clara to Mary Stuart, she thereby suggests—at least in Swinburne's mind7-an awesome identity. For Swinburne (who became so expert on the Scottish Queen that he was asked to contribute her biography to the Encyclopedia Britannica), Mary Stuart held a lifelong fas- cination. Like Lucretia Borgia, her beauty, strength, and ruthlessness made her one of history's authentic Paustines. In an essay on Mary, he wrote: . . . a deadlier or more dangerous enemy, it would be impossible to dread or desire. Passion alone could shake the double fortress of her impregnable heart and ever active brain. The passion of love, after very sufficient experience, she apparently and naturally outlived; the passion of hatred and revenge was . . . inextinguishable in her inmost nature. . . . For her own freedom of will and of way, of passion and of action, she cared much; for her creed she cared some-, thing; for her country, she cared less than nothing.^" In addition to his poem "Adieux a Marie Stuart," which he wrote in 1881, the terrible Queen inspired Swin­ burne to write one of the world's longest trilogies: Chastelard (I865), Bothwell (18?^), and Ma.ry Stuart (I88I). His depiction of Mary—especially in Chastelard. which is

^Another of Swinburne's never-completed novels was one centered around Lucretia Borgia, The Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei. This also dates from the early 'sixties. "Mary Queen of Scots," Works, IV, 408-409. 29 set during her first tumultuous years in Scotland when her beauty was most bewitching—reveals her as the Medieval counterpart of the ancient temptress-queens he described in "The Masque of Queen Bersabe." In a prefatory quotation from Maundevile's Voiapre and Travaile. Swinburne sets the mood for the entire trilogy: Another Yle is there tox^ard the Northe, in the See Occean, where that ben fulle cruele and ful evele Uommen of Nature; and thei han precious Stones in hire Eyen; and thei ben of that kynde, that zif they beholden ony man, thei sley him anon with the beholdynge, as dothe the Basilisk. 7

I4ary's beauty is at once overpox^rering and sinister: . . . her mouth, A flower's lip with a snake's lip, stinging sweet. And sweet to sting with: face that one would see And then fall blind and die with sight of it Held fast between the eyelids. . . , (I, i, p. 16) Though "her love is like a briar that rasps the flesh," she still "plucks all souls toward her like a net." Murray, a kinsman, is only one who shudders at her coldness and apparent incapacity to feel human emotion. He cries to her: It is right strange; The worst man living hath some fear, some love.

27 Chastelard. Works, II, 1. Subsequent quotations from this play will be documented within the text according to this edition. 30 Holds something dear a little for life's sake. Keeps fast to some compassion; you have none; You know of nothing that remembrance knows To make you tender. (IV, i, p. 79) The supernatural and pagan identifications are very much in evidence. I4ary is both Venus and vampire. 'When she, for example, is first introduced, she wears a breast-clasp which holds the two images in its design: "A Venus crox«ied, that eats the hearts of men: / Below her flies a love with a bat's wings" (I, i, p. 20). The Venus-vampire association is returned to again and again. Her lover, Chastelard, des­ tined to be executed for his.affair with Mary, soliloquizes even before his fall on her cruelty and his almost certain fate. "See you, she will not rid herself of me, / Not though she slay me: her sweet lips and life / Will smell of my split blood" (III, i, p. 5^). Later, Fxary herself tells Chastelard of her wedding night with her first husband, Damley: I do think He would have given his body to be slain. Having embraced my body. Now, God knows, I have no man to do as much for me As give me but a little of his blood To fill my beauty from, though I go down Pale to my grave for want— (III, i, p. 59) In the final act, Chastelard, ruined because of Mary and indeed doomed to death by her order, paces his cell remem­ bering her "long hands / Spread out, and pale throat and pale bright breasts, / Pit to make all men mad." Then: 31 For all Christ's work this Venus is not quelled. But reddens at the mouth with blood of men. Sucking betx':een small teeth the sap o' the veins. Dabbling with death her little tender lips— A bitter beauty, poisonous-pearled mouth. . . . Fair fearful Venus made of deadly foam, I shall escape you somehow. w.ith my death— (V, ii, p. 110) Apart from the l^Iary" Stuart trilogy, Swinburne wrote four other lengthy tragedies—three of which center around the person of la volupte; Marino Faliero (I885), The Sis­ ters (1892), and Rosamund. Queen of the Lombards (I899). Whereas Swinburne was more the erotic elf of Vic­ torian poetry (and clearly delighted in the role), Rossetti vras more the dreamer and mystic. "All art to Rossetti . . . opened the gate to a strange land, 'a land without any order,' timeless beyond the momentary momentousness of tran- 28 sitory experience." He drew his inspiration and his images from every source: history, theology, literature, and leg­ end. To Rossetti, nothing was more worthy of poetic and/or pictorial treatment than love and women. In "The Blessed Damozel," "The Lovers' Walk," his sonnet sequence. The House of Life. "Soul's Beauty," "Youth's Spring Tribute," and countless other poems, he apotheosizes physical beauty. In an admixture of Platonism and medieval chivalry, he saw the body's beauty, as a reflection in part of the beautiful soul-

28 Jerome Buckley, The Victorian Temper (New York, 196^). P. 1^7- 32 within, and an ideal love between man and vioman a means towards understanding the infinite. Especially in his ear­ lier poetry, love between an earthly blessed damozel and her suitor assumes a religious intensity, and significance: Between the hands, between the brows Between the lips of Love-lily, A spirit is bom whose birth endows My blood with fire to bum through me;

Brows, hands, and lips, heart, mind, and voice. Kisses and vrords of Love-lily— Ohl bid me with your joy rejoice Till riotous longing rest in me! Ah! let not hope be still distraught. But find in her its gracious goal. Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought. Nor Love her body from her soul. " But the numerous garlands to love's benevolence, woman's goodness, and the soul's heightened awareness through love, represent but one aspect of his poetry. An­ other facet—and one which was gradually emphasized during the last ten years of Rossetti's life when he was the victim of narcotics. Insomnia, failing health, and fantasies of every kind—shows a fascination with those themes associated with the femme fatale: malevolent love, woman as temptress ^ and seducer, and the fatal power of beauty to destroy. This

29 '^"Love-lily," p. 315. This and subsequent quota­ tions from Rossetti's work will be according to The Complete Works, ed. William Rossetti, I (London, 1886). Further pagination included within text. 33 duality is best symbolized in his art by Beatrice and Guenevere. Beatrice, like the Blessed Damozel, represents the love ideal. She is the beautiful woman of purity and compassion, whose love is both a spiritual and a physical experience. Guenevere, on the other hand, is la volupte. She wreaks havoc, death, and destruction through her beauty and perfidy. She is the cause of disgrace and dishonor for her lover, Lancelot; death for her husband and king, Arthur; and dissolution of the kingdom. Describing, for example, one of his innumerable Arthurian paintings, Rossetti wrote: '^Sir Lancelot /was/ prevented by his sin from entering the chapel of the San Grail. He has fallen asleep before the shrine full of angels, and, between him and it, rises in his 30 dream the image of Queen Guenevere, the cause of it all." The cruel, beautiful peasant girl of "A Last Con­ fession" follows in the tradition of the heartless, unfeeling destroyer of men: She had a mouth I'lade to bring death to life,—the underlip Sucked in, as if it strove to kiss itself. Her face was pearly pale, as when one stoops Over wan water. . . . Her body bore her neck as the tree's stem Bears the top branch; and as the branch sus­ tains The flox^er of the year's pride, her high neck bore That face made wonderful with night and day. (p. 24)

303ee Oswald Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New Haven, 19^9), P. 225. 34 Like Swinburne, Rossetti was strongly attracted to the pagan predators: Circe, the Siren, Venus, Helen, Astarte, Pandora, and numerous lesser figures. Most of the poems which he wrote about these women.were sonnets inspired by his or others' paintings, and, as could be expected, the sonnets are acknowledgments of their fatal power over men. The sonnet," "For the Wine of Circe" is typical. We see the "dark-haired and gold-robed" enchantress preparing her wine— "distilled of death and shame"—in expectation of new vie- • tims who are to arrive that evening. She is the symbol of y^ carnality and sensuousness which robs men of their reason, thus reducing them to the level of beasts. And the sestet mocks both the. pride of the future victims as well as scorns the old: Lords of their hour, they come. And by her knee Those cowering beasts, their equals hereto- . fore. Wait; who with them in new equality To-night shall echo back the sea's dull roar With a vain wail from passion's tide-strown shore Where the dishevelled seaweed hates the sea. (p. 350) Another sonnet, "A Sea-Spell," has for its theme the siren and her reptilian coldness:' She sinks into her spell: and when full soon Her lips move and she soars into her song. What creatures of the midmost main shall • throng In furrowed surf-clouds to the summoning rune: 35 Till he, the fated mariner, hears her cry. And up her rock, bare-breasted, comes to die? (p. 361) In addition to the above poetic treatment, Rossetti utilized the siren motif in one of his few pros'e efforts, "The Or­ chard Pit." More of a prose poem than a story, it is set in the Middle Ages and tells of a young knight lured from his betrothed by the Siren of the glen, even though he knows "that it means death for me" (p. 427). The Siren's physical description is' in line with the Pre-Raphaelite pattern: fair, tall, golden-haired, and with a pale, bloodless sen- suality. The parable of lust versus love, of beauty masking evil, ends with the knight following her song to dishonor and death: And now the Siren's song rose clearer as I vrent. At first she sang, "Come to Love;" and of the sweetness of Love she said many things. And next she sang, "Come to Life;" and Life was sweet in her" song. But long be­ fore I reached her, she knew that all her will vras mine: and then her voice rose softer than ever, and her words were, "Come to Death." (p. 430) Also very much in evidence in those poems which deal with la volupte is the suggestion of timelessness—of the soul's reincarnation through all ages to torment and torture the unwary: ". . . shall not each life forth-hurl'd / Again In new flesh be furl'd?" ("Cloud Confines," p. 317). The sonnet "Tiber, Nile, and Thames" suggests by its very title the connection between present and past. The poem opens 36 With the poet's lamenting the murder of Cicero, continues and touches upon the Antony-Cleopatra love affair, and con­ cludes with the poet's awakening from his reverie to ask, "And thou, Cleopatra's Needle .. . . / hast thou too reached, surviving death, / A city of sweet speech scorned" (p. 340). "Pandora" describes the beauty of the demi-goddess who un­ leashed all the evils that now beset mankind, and who is a mocking symbol of destruction even yet:

Ah! wherefore did the Olyn'plan consistory In its own likeness make thee half divine? Was it that Juno's brow might stand a sign For ever? and the mien of Pallas be A deadly thing? and that all men might see In Venus' eyes the gaze of Prosperine? (p. 360) Rossetti drew from the Christian tradition as well as from the Classical. Lilith, the mythical witch who was supposedly Adam's first mate,' was an especially appealing symbol. Like Pandora, Circe, and the rest, Lilith is the immortal enchantress: Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,) That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive. And her enchanted hair was the first gold. And still she sits, young while the earth is old. And, subtly of herself contemplative. Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave. Till heart and body and life are in its hold. The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where Is he not found, 0 Lilith, whom shed scent And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare? Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went 37 Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent And round his heart one strangling golden hair.-^ ("Body's Beauty," p. 2l6) She appears again in "Eden Bower." Her identity as the ava­ tar, the witch, is immediately noted: "Not a drop of her blood was human, / But she "was made like a soft sweet woman-.^1 1 (p. 308). Next, she remembers and gloats over her mastery of Adam during the time when she lived in the Garden as his "wife": "0 but Adam was thrall to Lilith! (Sing; Eden BOWBT! ) All the threads of my hair are golden. And there in a net his heart was holden. "0 and Lilith was queen of Adam! (Sing Eden Bower!) All the day and night together ^2 My breath could shake his soul like a feather.^

^^The hair of Lilith figures prominently when, on Walpurgis-night, Mephistopheles points her out to Faust: . Ay, she. First, wife to Adam, mark her carefully. Her, Lilith, with her dangerous lovely tresses. Of this, her sole adornment, best beware. For virile youth, when taken in that snare. Will come not lightly off from her caresses. Goethe, Faust, tr. Philip Wayne (Baltimore, 1949), I, 177. ^^In his essay, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Complete Works, XV, 39T Swinburne obviously saw in Lilith a conception identical to his own in "Laus Veneris": "The song of Lilith," he wrote, "has all the beauty and glory and force in it of the splendid creature so long worshipped of men as god or dreaded as devil. . . . The passion of the cast-off temptress, in whose nets of woven hair all the souls are entangled of 38 Cast out of Eden and supplanted by Eve, she becomes Satan's ally and lover, seduces Eve into disobedience (a role tra­ ditionally Satan's himself), and vows to avenge her pride's injury upon the descendants of Adam: "'And let God learn how I loved and hated / I4an in the image of God created'" (p. 309). She knows the strength of her beauty, and cries to Satan: "Strong is God, the fell foe of Lilith: (Ala.s the hour! ) Nought in heaven or earth may affright Him; But join thou with me and we will smite Him." (p. 309) Rossetti's Lady Lilith, like his Circe or Pandora, is an image "grandly cast in words, of lust, alone, aloof, im­ mortal, immovable, outside of death in the dark of things everlasting."-^-^ Her satanic beauty and unrelenting cruelty is set forth again in one of his medieval ballads, "Sister Helen." Helen is one of Lilith's countless progeny. In Helen, hatred, the thirst for blood, the insatiable desire for vengeance, have all combined in her to crush every human quality. Quite literally, she is a x-iitch—turning to Satan and the black arts in order to destroy her lover. Deaf to her rival's sons through all their generations, has such ac­ tual and instant flame of wrath and brilliance of blood and fragrance of breath in it, that we feel face to face the very vision of the old tale. ..." 33 ^"^Swinbume, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," "forks. XV, 37. 39 all pleas for mercy from the victim's father, brothers, and bride, Helen methodically plies her witchcraft against the hapless Keith of Ewern: "'.';hy did you melt your^/razen man. Sister Helen? Today is the third since you began."

(p. 73) The final testimony to the demonic power of passion in her is Helen's readiness to sacrifice her soul as the price for vengeance: "Oh, his son still cried, if you forgive. Sister Ealen, The body dies, but the soul shall live." "Fire shall forgive me as I forgive, Little brother!" (0 I'lother. Harv Mother, As she forgives. betT'een Hell and Ee?.ven?)

"Ah! what white thing at the door has crossed. Sister Helen? Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?" "A soul that's lost as mine is lost, Little brother!" (^ I'othsr. I-l9.ry Kother, Lost, lost, all lost, "between Hell and Heaven! ) (p. IS) From Rossetti, the next and final Pre-Raphaelite poet I wish to consider is Arthur O'Shaughnessy, His un­ timely death in 1881 at the age of thirty-six cut short a promising career. He published only four volumes of verse, but they testify to the frequency with which l9^ volu^ote began to appear. The volximes are: Tne Epic of V'omen (I870), ?• m\

40 Lavs ^ France (I872), Music and Moonlight (I874), and the posthumous Song of a Worker (I88I). Though O'Shaughnessy is one of the least remembered writers of the Pre-Raphaelites, his reputation during his lifetime was significant. Louise Moulton, for example, notes that The Epic of Women "was a remarkable first volume and it had a remarkable' success,, which at once gave the author a decided position among the poets of his time; and, from him who had done so much already /almost upon his arrival in London, O'Shaughnessy was considered a poet of talent/, people 34 expected much more."^ His Epic of Women owes a great deal to Swinbume and Rossetti. O'Shaughnessy's fascination with the idea and im­ age of the femme fatale is everjrwhere apparent. Like Swin­ burne's "The Masque of Queen Bersabe," O'Shaughnessy's poem opens with a catalogue of history's carnivorous women—begin­ ning with Eve: Prom Eve—whom God made And left her as He made her—without soul. And lo! when He had held her for a season In His own pleasure palace above. He gave her unto men; this is the reason She is so fair to see, so false to love.35

34Louise Moulton, Arthur O'Shaughnessy; His Life and Work (London, I894), p. 20. 3^See G. Turquet-Milnes, The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England (London, I913), P. 220. 41 From Eve he goes on to Venus, Cleopatra, Salome, and Helen. His descriptions of la volupte frequently rival in richness the best efforts of Swinbume. Cleopatra, for example, is the perfect picture of serpentine sens-uousness as she awaits Antony:

She was reclined upon a Tyrian couch Of crimson wools; out of her loosened vest Set on one shoulder with serpent brooch Pell one white arm and half her foam-white breast. And with the breath of many a fanning plume. That wonder of her hair that was like wine— Of mingled fires and purples that consume— Moved all its mystery of threads most fine. And under saffron canopies all bright With clash of lights, e'en to the amber prow Crept, like enchantments subtle, passing light. Fragrance, and siren-music soft and slow.36 The splendor of the. royal barge, the fact that the Queen awaits her prey reclining in the utmost luxury, even the ari^ngement of her gown, all tend to suggest the histori­ cal reality that the Cleopatra who came to Antony was no longer in her. first youth. Though still beautiful, O'Shaugh­ nessy's Queen conquers by artifioe as well as instinct. In contrast to Cleopatra's cunning, we see a Salome, however, who is totally animal: Her long black hair danced round her like a snake Allured to each charmed movement she did make;

3 Louise.Moulton, Arthur O'Shaughnessy. p. 24. mxe -• ta •

42 Her voice came strangely sweet;

Her sweet arms were unfolded on the air. They seemed like floating flowers the most fair— White lilies the most choice; And in the gradual bending of her hand There lurked a grace no man could withstand; Yea, none knew whether hands, or feet, or voice. Made most his heart rejoice. The veils fell round her like thin coiling mists Shot through by topaz suns . . . And out of them her jewelled body came And seemed to all quite like a slender flame That curled and glided, and that burnt and shone Most fair to look upon. Her dance, he continues, "was like some spell / Of winding magic, wherein heaven and hell / VJere joined to lull men's souls. . . ."^' And just as Salome's dance was a prelude to the murder of John the Baptist, so too do her descendants demand and get the lives of men as tribute to their beauty. Except for the color of her hair, the opening verse of "To a Young Murderess" could easily be Salome: Pair yellow murderess, whose gilded head Gleaming with deaths; whose deadly body white. Writ over with secret records of the dead; Whose tranquil eyes, that hide the dead from sight Down in their tenderest depth and bluest bloom; Whose strange unnatural grace, whose pro­ longed youth. Are for my death now and the shameful doom ^g Of all the men I might have been in truth.^

37 •^^ "Salome," pp. 28-31. Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy. ed. William Percy (New Haven, I923). 38rbid.^ p, 50. #^-:V^.

43 In the many O'Shaughnessy poems which deal with the cruelty and majesty of la volupte. he too links the present with the past to give an aura of immortality to her beauty. This metaphorical regeneration of the femme fatale is the theme of "The Disease of the Soul." Though it is far too lengthy to quote in its entirety, several key passages pro­ vide a direct, lucid statement of her history and character. The speaker is la. volupte herself: Mine were the odorous bowers On Tiber river and Nile; The orgies of fabulous hours. Under the spell of a smile; Greek houses and Orient towers; Euphrates' glittering mile; She goes on to name other civilizations and societies in which she had lived and received tribute "that strange kings left in my hands." Then she begins to describe her beauty and identity as the Beautiful Evil: My face was kissed by the morning. My body was kissed all night. The women kissed me, adorning . My beautiful limbs for the bath I stood forth, and knew that the sight Of my foim was the world's delight. And loving and laughing and scorning, I passed down the day's fair path.

My red mouth fashioned for joy. Rich bloom of the world's fairest hour. Is pale with faint kisses that cloy And sadden and wither and sting; My form, like a blue-veined flower. Has learned to droop and to cower; \m:Wr' W

44 And my loves are griefs that destroy The lovers to whom I cling.

I know all men, and read in their eyes A death and a sentence of days; I exchange magic words and-replies With the phantoms and fates hanging o'er them: And my lovers have wearisome ways. For I know all their love and their praise. And they echo the words and the sighs That were echoes of others before them. . . . I charm them, and make them believe me, I promise and do not give; With hope and despair I dwell. Between farewell and farewell;

As queen, then, or lady peerless. Or siren cruel and cold. Or captive forgotten and cheerless I lived, or suffered, or slept.39 Much of O'Shaughnessy's poetry echoes what we have already seen: deathless harlequins gloating in the obeisance such beauty receives from passion. Like many in his circle, O'Shaughnessy seldom strayed far afield from this one theme, and his individual poems tend to read as variations upon a central motif rather than as distinctive, organic entities. As vre shall see, this paucity of creative imagination which the Pre-Raphaelite technical wizardry never really obliterated entirely became an unwelcomed part of the legacy inherited by the Aesthetes during the 'eighties and 'nineties.

39Music and Moonlight (London, 1874), pp. 92-109. ^•mmm^^'i:- w

CHAPTER III

AESTPIETIC LITERATURE

... I know .her well. Of lover's vows she hath no care. And little good a man can tell Of one so cruel and fair. True love is but a woman's toy. They never l-cnow the lover's pain. And I who loved as loves a boy Must love in vain, must love in vain. —Oscar Wilde First of all, in this particular study, a division between the Pre-Raphaelite poets and the Aesthetic (or Deca­ dent) artists is somewhat artificial. Indeed, the symbol of la. volupti seems to have grasped the imaginations of the Aesthetes as strongly as it did the Pre-Raphaelites. Cer­ tainly by the 'nineties the love that consumes its victim and the fatal, beautiful woman who has a half-symbolic, half- lite2?al ancestory in the various femme fa tales of Christian and Pagan tradition are themes which appear with monotonous frequency. So many are the examples which offer themselves that, as with the previous chapter, I shall draw my illustra­ tions only from the most important and influential artists. Though not a poet, Walter Pater holds a place of especial significance in the Aesthetic Period. It was Pater's ideas, criticisms, philosophy, and temperament which helped to create and color the Aesthetic Movement. Pater, says

>*5 m^^^Hir^i^b^'y'^ m

46 Starkie, "set the tone for literature and aesthetic criticism for a whole generation." Pater's vrritings show a love for the exotic and o^^^tre. In his essay on Michelangelo, he. declares that "a certsir. L:^:....: ::.r,es-. :jmething of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art." And in one of his most important criticisms, "Leonardo da Vinci," he re­ veals his own emotional make-up to the reader far more than he does the art of the Renaissance genius. And basically we see a nature infatiiated with the themes we have been studying. Writing of da Vinci's early career in Florence, he characterizes the artist as one in whom "the extremes of beauty and terror shaped itself, as an image that might be seen and touched. "42 And from his early period, Pater sees da Vinci's "Medusa" as "the one .great picture which he left behind him in Florence" (p. 106). Pater's description of the painting is worth noting:

The subject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone realises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death. What may be called the fascina­ tion of corruption penetrates in every touch its ex­ quisitely finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat flits unheeded. . . . The hue which violent death always brings with it is in its features: features singularly massive and grand. (p. 106)

^^Enid Starkie, From Gautier to Eliot (London, 1962), P. 57. ^^"The Poetry of Michelangelo," The Complete Works of WaTber Pater (London, 1910), II, 73- "Leonardo da Vinci," Complete Works. I, 104. wm:f- ^smwi, w

• 47 Later, the high-priest of Aestheticism declares that "Leo- naixio's type of womanly beauty" is the temptress, the— Daughters of Herodias, with their fantastic head-dresses knotted and folded so strangely to leave the dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are npt. of the Christian family. , , , Nervous, electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, they seem to be subject to ex­ ceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the com­ mon air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, re­ ceptacles of them, and pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences. (pp. 115-116) The theme which inspired Swinburne's "Laus Veneris"—the idea of the pagan Venus still existing, even in a world which no longer believes in her, and punishing man's disaffection to Christianity by luring him through the passions into lust, sin, and eventual destruction 3—is touched upon by Pater to describe Leonardo's "Saint John the Baptist." It was this painting, says Pater, "whose delicate brown flesh and woman's hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, and whose treacherous smile would have us understanding something far beyond the outward gesture or circumstance" that set

43 •^Swinburne's "Laus Veneris" is taken from the medi­ eval legend of the knight, Tannhauser, who was enamored of Venus, journeyed to Rome to beg absolution for his sinful love from Pope Urban, was refused, and returned to the cause of his damnation, Venus. In the Art for Art's Sake atmos­ phere which gripped both Prance and England during the last half of the century, the Tannhauser-Venus legend became enor­ mously popular. In Prance, Baudelaire, Gautier, and the Sym­ bolists were like Rossetti in dividing love into two distinct categories. One form, the pure and ennobling love, was sym­ bolized by the White Venus. The other form, sensual and lust­ ful, was represented by the Black Venus: the Venus of i»;5''.

48 Theophile Gautier thinking of pagan divinities in Christian guise—of "decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves, after the fall of paganism, took employment in the new religion" (p. 118). But it is Leonardo's masterpiece, "La Gioconda," which inspires Pater's greatest eloquence. In her "un­ fathomable-smile," he sees . , . what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty,•into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which"she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of 14ary; and all this has been to her but as the

Tannhauser. In Germany, Wanger composed an opera from the story, and in England, besides Swinburne's poem, the legend inspired Morris' "The Hill of Venus," Davidson's "A New Ballad of Tannhauser," and Beardsley's only novel. Under the Hill. ^1-4 It was also Swinburne's inspiration for his maca­ bre little tale, "The Marriage of Monna Lisa," Works, VII, 61-64. K^'M'mrMstMfy-, m\

49 sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the deli­ cacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. (pp. 124-125) Pater's description of Monna Lisa as the. Lady of Pain is but one instance of his seeing something overwhelmingly sinister in feminine beauty. In his essay, "Demeter and Persephone," he draws an interesting distinction between these two god­ desses. Demeter is the mater dolorosa—the wandering woman of pity and sorrow who was only created in man's conscious­ ness after religion (and himself) became "humanized." And the evolution of Demeter in Greek religion to the more human, less majestic, figure is, to Pater, one index of "the higher side of the Greek religion . . . refined by art, and ele- 4*5 vated by it to the sense of beauty. . . ."^ She came to be "the very type of the wandering woman, going grandly, indeed, as Homer describes her, yet so human in her anguish that we seem to recognize some far descended shadow of her, in the homely.figure of the roughly clad French peasant woman, who, in one of Corot's pictures, is hasting /sic/ along under a sad light, as the day goes out behind the lit­ tle hill" (p. 146). But in Persephone, Pater sees the combination of beauty and death which allies her to history's Monna Lisas

-^Complete Works of Walter Pater, VII, l44. i '^'^••••••iBi' m

50 and other voluptes. Characteristically, Pater reserves his most articulate and artistic descriptions for the languid goddess of the underworld: "In contrast ^to Demeter/ Persephone is wholly unearthly, the close companion, and even the confused double, of Hecate, the goddess of midnight ter­ rors . . . and as sorrow is the characteristic sentiment of Demeter, so awe of Persephone. She is compact of sleep, and death ... a revenant. who in the garden of Aidoneus has eaten of the pomegranate, and bears away the secret of decay in her. ..." (p. l43). Thus, the "primitive cosmical im­ port" of Demeter gave way to a softer image of the goddess as a symbol of human sorrow, while Persephone's fatal beauty re­ tained its sinister power "to make men in love . . . with death" (p. 149).^^ Pater's delight in the femme fatale was inherited 'in full by his most famous disciple, Oscar Wilde. "Phedre" is but one example of some ancient spirit reincarnated: Ah! surely once some urn of Attic clay Held thy wan dust, and thou hast come again Back to this common world so dull and vain. For thou wert weary of the sunless day. The heavy fields of scentless asphodel, ur^ The loveless lips with which men kiss in Hell.

^ Pater was not, of course, the only one to deal with Persephone. She figures prominently in both Pre- Raphaelite and Aesthetic art and poetry. 47'"Phedre,. " p. 170. Quotations from Wilde's poetry will be according to The Poems and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (New York, n.d.). Modem Library Edition. 'i^s,'^'^ m

51 Again, in "The New Helen," he asks: Where hast thou been since round the walls of Troy The sons of God fought in that great emprise? Why dost thou walk our common earth again? Hast thou forgotten that impassioned boy. His purple galley and his Tyrian men And treacherous Aphrodite's mocking eyes? For surely it was thou, who, like a star Hung in the silver silence of the night. Didst lure the Old World's chivalry and might Into the clamorous crimson waves of warI

0 Helen! Helen! Helen! yet a while. Yet for a little while, 0, tarry here. Till the dawn cometh. ... Of heaven or hell I. have no thought or fear. Seeing I know no other god but thee. (pp. 84-86) Wilde's poetry owes an obvious debt to Rossetti and Swinbume—both of whom he greatly admired as artists. This debt to the Pre-Raphaelites shows itself in part in a few, rather unsuccessful, attempts at medieval balladry \ la Rossetti and in many of his word-pictures of the soulless woman. The following could very well be a Rossetti painting or one of Swinburne's pale, blue-veined sirens: • Her hair is bound with myrtle leaves (Green leaves upon her golden hair!) Green grasses through the yellow sheaves Of autumn com are not more fair. Her little lips, more made to kiss Than to cry bitterly for pain. Are tremulous as brook-water is. Or roses after evening rain. w^-W^P^'- f "'xflMHBIHHPI,

52 Her neck is like white melilote Flushing for pleasure of the sun. The throbbing of the linnet's throat Is not so sweet to look upon. As a pomegranate, cut in twain. White-seeded is her crimson -mouth. . . . 0 twining hands! 0 delicate White body made for love and pain! 0 House of Love! 0 desolate Pale flower. ... ("La Bella Donna Delia Mia Mente," pp. II7-II8) In "Impression du Matin," Wilde becomes more the Symbolist when he, first, describes a London night enveloped by a swirling, yellow fog which makes everything shadow; then, as day begins to break: . . . suddenly arose the clang Of waking life; the streets were stirred With country wagons: and a bird Flew to the glistening roofs and sang. But one pale woman all alone. The daylight kissing her wan hair. Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare. With lips of flame and heart of stone. (p. 107) The idea of pagan deities alive and hostile in a world of unbelievers is the theme of "Santa Decca": The Gods are dead: no longer do we bring To grey-eyed Pallas crowns of olive-leaves! Demeter's child no more hath tithe of sheaves. And in the noon the careless shepherds sing. For Pan is dead. . . . And yet—perchance in this sea-tranced isle. Chewing the bitter fruit of memory. Some God lies hidden in the asphodel. kjMmmr.d'f^. w

53 Ah Love! if such there be, then it vre re well For us to fly his anger: nay, but see, The leaves are stirring: let us watch awhile, (p. 162) Wilde retums to this idea in "The Sphinx." Similar in tone and technique to "The Raven," it opens with a student won­ dering, with ever-increasing terror, about the strange statu­ ette in his room which seems to watch him with eyes that comprehend: In a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom. Inviolate and immobile she does not rise, she does not stir For silver moons are naught to her and naught to her the suns that reel. (p. 267) The Sphinx becomes the symbol of loveless passion. She is the "exquisite grotesque! half woman and half animal!" Like the Dark Venus or the vampire, she exists through all eter- nity--seducing, then devouring, her victims with cold in­ difference: Who were your lovers? who were they who wrestled for you in the dust? Which was the vessel of your lust? What Leman had you, every day? (p. 270) As goddess, one lover was Ammon: You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame: you made the horned god your own: < •

5k You stood behind him on his throne: you called him by his secret name. , , . White Ammon was your bedfellow! Your chamber was the steaming Nile! And with your curved archaic smile you watched his passion come and go. (p. 273) As a life force, she is lust. The student's monologue ends emphasizing her destructiveness and alliance with Satan for the souls of men: What snake-tressed fury fresh from Hell, with uncouth gesture and unclean. Stole from the poppy-drowsy queen and led you to a student's cell? What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night. And saw my taper burning bright, and knocked, and bade you enter in. . . . Get hence, you loathsome mystery: Hideous animal, get hence! You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be. You make my creed a barren sham, you wake foul dreams of sensual life And Atys with his blood-stained knife were bet­ ter than the thing I am. False Sphinx! False Sphinx! By reedy Styx old Charon, leaning on his oar. Waits for my coin. Go thou before, and leave me to my crucifix. Whose pallid burden, sick with pain, watches the world with wearied eyes. And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for every soul in vain. (pp. 278-279) 55 The last work by Wilde I wish to consider is not a he poem at all, but his one-act poetic tragedy, Salome. Of the biblical femme fatales. Salome was by far the most popu­ lar to the fin de siecle artists. O'Shaughnessy's poem about her has already been noted. Besides these two, Huysmans, Swinbume, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Massenet, Symons, and countless lesser lights were fired by the story to some sort of tribute. Considering her popularity, the matter-of-fact tone of the Bible's two accounts is somewhat surprising. In Matthew 14 we find the following: But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod. Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her what­ soever she would ask. And she, being instructed of her mother, said. Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger. And the king was sorry: nevertheless for the oath's sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her. And he sent, and be­ headed John in the prison. And the-head was brought in a charger, and given to the damsel: and she brought it to her mother. And in Mark 6: And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; And when the daughter of

48 Written, according to Wilde, in a single evening in 1891, the original version was in French. Immediately banned in England, its first performance was by Sarah Bern­ hardt in Paris in I896, largely as a gesture of friendship for its imprisoned author. Translated into English in I894 by Lord Alfred Douglas, it was later adapted by Richard Strauss for an opera. 1

5(> the said Herodias came in, and danced, a.nd pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel. Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her. Whatsoever thou Shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom. And she went forth, and said unto her mother. What shall I ask? And she. said, The head of John the Baptist. And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me' by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist. And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes V7hich sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison. And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother. While the biblical Salome is hardly Girl Scout material, she lacks the majestic proportions of sin and beauty which made her in the minds of the Aesthetes the supreme symbol of irresistible evil: /Salome i.s7 the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles,-- a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irre­ sponsible, insensible, poisoning, like Helen of Troy of the old Classic fables, all who come near her, all who see her, all who touch her.^° Wilde makes his Salome a woman of evil and horror— a creature of singular depravity. Certainly, his charac­ terization is far more terrible and passionate than what we have in the biblical narrative. She is the supreme demon- lover and avatar. Like the classic volupte. she has a

"j. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (New York, 1931)y p. l4l. Translator's name not given. 57 paleness about her which suggests the vampire, a strange beauty which warns of death. In the opening lines of the play, Wilde very effectively projects her sinister beauty with a kind of double entente spoken by one of the youths: THE YOUNG SYRIAN: How beautiful is the Princess Salome to-night! THE PAGE OF HERODIAS: Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things. THE YOUNG SYRIAN: She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. One might fancy she was dancing, THE PAGE OP HERODIAS: She is like a woman who is dead. She moves very slowly.

THE YOUNG SYRIAN: How pale the Princess is. Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.50 With neither soul nor conscience, she responds only to her own terrible lusts,-^-^ around which Wilde weaves the play.

^QSalome (New York, 1927)r PP. 3-4. ^Swinbume, while delighting in her deadliness, invests his Salome with a type of basic innocence—the inno­ cence of a beautiful, deadly animal whose role in life is to destroy. In his view, she is as blameless as any preda­ tory animal. In his essay, "Notes on Designs of the Old I/Lasters at Florence," Works, V, 192, he describes the Salome of Andrea del Sarto's painting as "an incarnate figure of music, grave and graceful, light and glad . . . with the cold charm of girlhood and the mobile charm of childhood; as indifferent and innocent when she stands before Herodias /as/ when she receives the severed head of John with her r« ^rw^r

58 It is not Herodias who thinks to demand the head of John the Baptist, but Salome herself—her revenge upon him for spurning her passion: "I am amorous of thy body, Jokanaan! Suffer me to touch thy body. Thy hair is like clusters of grapes, like the clusters of black grapes that hang from the vine-trees of Edom in the land of the Edomites. Thy mouth is redder than the feet of the doves who inhabit the temples and are fed by the priests. There is nothing in the world so red as thy mouth. Suffer me to kiss thy mouth" (pp. 19-22). Wilde ends the play with a grotesque flourish. Salome demands that the head be brought to her. Accordingly, the executioner brings it in upon a silver shield, whereupon she seizes it and raises it to her face and cries: "Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. Well I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. I said it; did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now" (p. 54). Among Arthur Symons' innumerable poems which treat the power that the femme fatale has to destroy and corrupt man, many use Salome as their central theme and image. Under slender and steady hands; a pure bright animal, knowing nothing of man, and of life nothing but instinct and mo­ tion; . . . her beauty is a maiden force of nature, capable of bloodshed without bloodguiltiness." rj-^VT"!^^

59 the collective title Studies in Stranp:e Sins., for instance, he has a series of eight poems which were inspired by and which compliment Vlilde's play. Salome is again the soulless woman of lust and passion: Lust in her naked breasts that have two eyes. Lust in her flesh, the flesh he looks upon. Lust that makes her whole body undulate. Lust on her lips; the lust that never dies. Between the hollow of her breasts, a sign Sinister of that hell that lives within Her limbs that long for him; her mouth like wine, Wine, that she gives to spirits more malign Than hers. 52 Throughout the other seven pieces, she remains virtually un­ changed—the daughter of death, the vampire, the "painted angel of some delicate Lust / Who treads on snake-like lives as if they were dust" ("The Eyes of Herod," II, 280). Another, earlier poem by Symons, "The Dance of the Daughter of Herodias," moves from a literal description of Salome's dance to show her as the symbol of history's count­ less carnivorous women: They dance, the daughters of Herodias, With their eternal, white, unfaltering feet. And always, when they dance, for their delight. Always a man's head falls because of them, , , . they are the eternal enemy. Not till the end of time will they put by The weaving of slow steps about men's hearts. They shall be beautiful, they shall be loved.

^^"John and Salome," The Collected Works of Arthur Svmons (London, 1924), II, 278. 60 . . . Dance in the desolate air. Dance always, daughters of Herodias, With your eternal, white, unfaltering feet. (II, 39-40) Symons was certainly one of the most prolific writ­ ers in the Aesthetic Movement, ar^d in his hundreds of poems, la volupte appears again and again. If anything, Symons was even more blatantly derogatory about the feminine ideal than were his compatriots at the Cheshire Cheese. ^-^ "The Vampire" is but one of many: Intolerable woman, Where's the name For your insane complexity of shame? Vampire! white bloodless creature of the night. Whose lust of blood has blanched her chill veins white. Veins fed with moonlight over dead men's tombs; Whose eyes remember many martyrdoms. So that their depths, whose depth cannot be found, Are shadowed pools in which a soul lies drowned; Who would fain have pity, but she may not rest Till she have sucked a man's heart from his breast. And drained his life-blood from him, vein by vein. And seen his eyes grow brighter for the pain. And his lips sign her name with his last breath. As the man swoons ecstatically on death, (III, 173) When Symons deals with the demonic, woman, the femme fatale. or the idea of evil working through beauty to destroy, he more often than not gives it the usual aura of deathlessness

<3 ^"^Among the aesthetic poets which met at the tavern were Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, William Butler Yeats, Victor Plarr, and John Davidson. 61 (or reincarnation) which we have noted before as being charac­ teristic of the image. In "Modem Beauty," the links between past and present are clearly forged: I am the torch, she saith, and- what to me If the moth die of me? . . . ' I am Yseult and Helen, I have seen Troy bum, and the most loving knight lie dead. The world has been my mirror, time has been My breath upon the glass; and men have said, Age after age, in rapture and despair, Love's poor few words, before my image there. (II, 82) "Stella Pigura" combines the themes of the satanic lover (the serpent imagery); the medieval sorceress, or witch­ craft (the look of Vivien in her eyes); and the inevita­ bility of destruction (the somber tone of death in the closing stanzas) to describe the poet's lover: Her beauty has the serpent's undulant grace. The rhythm and flow of softly fluctuant line; And in the stealthy contours of her face. And in her eyes, the charm is"serpentine. Her eyes have gleams that shine implacably, A glitter cold and sharp as swords; they smile Subtly as Vivien by the cloven tree On Merlin growing careless of her guile. Her face in smiling wakes strange memories. Memories of death and old forgotten woe; Her eyes are pools where many a drowned hope lies. They shine above the dead that sleep below. The very charm of death is in her look. The fascination of all delicate deaths Of mortals who in easeful ways, forsook The taking of so many weary breaths. 62 She is one of Pater's Persephones: Her beauty is the mask of spectral nights; She smiles, and tells no secret. Lips so red Are roses for a garden of delights. Surely and never any garden-bed. Flushed with a ruddier fragrance":—what of dreams I Only shake loose the perfume of thy hair. And let me bathe in those delirious streams, Stella, and I intoxicate despair! (Ill, 202) In its companion poem, "Stellae Anima Clamat," Symons makes her seem timeless, as though she has existed for hundreds of years without change: She sat before her mirror, and she gazed Deep into eyes that gazed at her again.

She saw her beauty hold the world in awe. Triumphing over all beneath the sun. She saw her slain revive, the tombless dead. Dead souls that dwell in mortal bodies yet. She heard the maledictions that they said Before a bar of judgment ever set. These were her lovers; she to them had been The Rosa mystica—rose passion-pale! The poison 'neath the petals slept unseen; For she was beautiful, and man is frail. (Ill, 205) In like manner, Cleopatra has "the immemorial eyes" of one whose presence on earth was more than a single span of years "Your eyes have drunk Eternity . . . / Your eyes hold fast the mystery / Of other memories than ours" ("Cleopatra," III, 257). UMMHMHHni'; ¥

63 Finally, it should be pointed out that the Symons' volupte is distinguished by her pale, bloodless coloring, as are those of the other artists: I spoke to the pale and heavy-li.dded woman, and said: 0 pale and heavy-lidded woman, why is your cheek Pale as the dead, and what are your eyes afraid lest they speak? And the woman answered me: I am pale as the dead. For the dead have loved me, and I have dreamed of the dead. ("The Pale Woman," II, 64) And in "The Song of the Siren," Symons employs this familiar symbol of the temptress explicitly to contrast her pale, cold- heartedness with the passionate desires of her victim: Our breasts are cold, salt are our kisses, Your blood shall whiten in our sea-blisses; A man's desire is a flame of fire. But chill as water is our desire. (II, 232) Again, in "The Flames of Hell," he writes: There is much gold hair that the flames of hell Shall take fast hold on. Bodies are not white For heaven, where the blood shall wash them clean: These women's bodies are too white; sweet scents Bum fiercely; there's fragrant pile for hell. (Ill, 241) Among the periodicals of the day to which Symons' contributed stories and poems was The Yellow Book. Pub­ lished by John Lane from I894-I897, it was probably the 6i^ outstanding magazine of Decadence and of the fin de siecle rebellion in England.-^ A quick glance through its pages helps to show, among other things, just how ubiquitous 77as the image of la volupte by the mid-'nineties. Thus far, we have only dealt with the most famous artists; The Yellow Book proves that the sjnubol—retaining those characteristics al­ ready described and illustrated—was indeed widely popular with a host of poets and authors long since forgotten. For example, Theodore Wratislaw's "To Salome at St. James's" is but another instance of suggested reincarnation using the figure of Salome: Flower of the ballet's nightly mirth. Pleased with a trinket or a gown. Eternal as eternal earth You dance the centuries down. For you, my plaything, slight and light. Capricious, petulant and proud. With whom I sit and sup to-night Among the tawdry crowd. Are she whose swift and sandalled feet And postured girlish beauty won A pagan prize, for you unmeet. The head of Baptist John. And after ages, when you sit A princess less in birth and power. Freed from the theatre's fume and heat To kill an idle hour.

^^Some of the other periodicals of the 'nineties were: The Savoy. The Parade. The Pageant. The Everp!:reen, The Hobby Horse. The Chameleon. The Rose Leaf. The Quarto. g:]ne. Dome, and The Chord. See, Holbrook Jackson, The Eip:h- tiln Nineties iNew York, 1913)r P. 4l. itmm

65 Here in the babbling room agleam With scarlet lips and naked arms And such rich jewels as beseem The painted damzel's charms. Even now your tired and subtle face Bears record to the wondrous, time When from your limbs' lascivious grace Sprang forth your splendid crime. And though none deem it true, of those Who watch you in our banal age Like some stray fairy glide and pose Upon a London stage. Yet I to whom your frail caprice Turns for the moment ardent"eyes Have seen the strength of love release Your sleeping memories. I too am servant to your glance, I too am bent beneath your sway, My wonder! My desire! who dance Men's heads and hearts away. Sweet arbitress of love and death. Unchanging on time's changing sands. You hold more lightly than a breath The world between your hands!55 Another bit of verse which seems almost" Pre-Raphaelite in its word imagery uses the pagan beauty, Pyrrha, as its evil inspiration. , By one Charles Newton-Robinson, it begins: Pyrrha, the wan, the golden-tressed! For what bright boy are you waiting, dressed So witchingly, in your simple best? Yes, like a witch in her cave, you sit In the gilded midnight, rosy-lit; ^^ While snares for souls of men you knit.-^^

-^-^The Yellow Book. Ill (October, 1894), 110-111. 56 "Hor. Car. I. 5: A Modem Paraphrase," TYB, IV (January, 1895)r 202. 66 Complimenting the poetic treatments of 1^ volupte in The Yellow Book are numerous stories which also center around the femme fatale. One such work is Victoria Cross' "Theodora." The plot is simplicity itse.lf—a young English gentleman (who is also something of the dandy) falling vic­ tim to the charms of an heiress of peculiar beauty and repu­ tation, Theodora. The many descriptions of Theodora's beauty show her to be a pale, exotic, and sinister creature: She was . . . dressed in some dark stuff that fitted closely to her, and let me see the harmonious lines of her figure as she came up to me. The plain, small collar of the dress opened at the neck, and a delicious, solid, white throat rose from the dull stuff like an almond bursting from its husk. On the pale, well-cut face and small head great care had evidently been be­ stowed. The eyes were darkened, as last night, and the hair arranged vrith infinite pains on the forehead and rolled into one massive coil at the back of her neck.57

Ray, the young Englishman, continues: "She shook hands with a smile—a smile that failed to dispel the air of fatigue and fashionable dissipation that seemed to cling to her" (p. l6l). Her white skin and scarlet mouth are repeatedly mentioned, and here she seems almost to have stepped from a Beardsley etching: Prom where we stood we could see down into the victoria, as it drew up at the door. Her /Theodora'^ knees were crossed under the blue carriage rug, on the edge of

^•^The Yellow Book. IV, I6O-I6I, 67 which rested her two small pale-gloved hands. A velvet jacket, that fitted her as its skin fits the grape, showed us her magnificent shoulders, and the long easy slope of her figure to her small waist. On her head . . . amongst the black glossy masses of her hair, sat a small hat in vermillion velvet, made to resemble the Turkish fez. . . . The handsome painted eyes, the natu­ rally scarlet lips, the pallor of the oval face, and each well-trained movement of the distinguished figure, as she rose and stepped from the carriage, were noted and watched. . . .

(p. 173) Theodora is linked in various ways to the past, both by her own statements and Cross' descriptions. When Ray goes for the first time to her home, he enters what is in reality a pagan temple: The room I was shown into was large, much too large to be comfortable on such a day; and I had to thread my way through a perfect maze of gilt-legged tables and statuette-bearing tripods before I reached the hearth. Here burnt a small, quiet, chaste-looking fire, a sort of Vestal flame, whose heat was lost upon the tesselated tiles, white marble, and polished brass about it. (p. 160) Later, Theodora half-jokingly compares herself to the "daugh­ ter of Herodias" (p. I96). Finally, towards the end of the story, Theodora's paganism is again suggested, this time at length. Visiting Ray in his rooms, she studies with delight his collection of Eastern idols. He places before her "a small, unutterably hideous, squat female figure, with the face of a monkey, and two closed wings of a dragon on its shoulders" (p. 179). It is, he tells her, the Hindu equiva­ lent of the Greek Aphrodite. 68 "Oh, Venus," said The.odora. "We must certainly crown her amongst them /the other idols/. ..." And she laughingly slipped off a diamond half-loop from her middle finger, and slipped the ring on to the model's head. It fitted exactly round the repulsive bi^ows of the deformed and stunted image, and the goddess /.symbol of passion and lust/ stood- crowned in the centre of the table, amongst the other figures, with the cir­ clet of brilliants, flashing brightly in the firelight, on her head. As Theodora passed the ring from her own warm white finger on to the forehead of the misshapen idol, she looked at me. . . . On the spur of it, I dragged forward to myself another of the images from behind the Astarte, slipped off my own signet-ring, and put it on the head of the idol. (pp. 179-180) In response to her question, he tells her the image he has crowned is Shiva, "the god of self-denial. " Then: I saw the colour die out of her face. . . . The next moment she leant back in her chair, saying lightly, "A false, absurd, and unnatural god; it is the greatest error to strive after the impossible. . . . Gods like these," and she indicated the abominable squint-eyed Venus, "are merely natural instincts per­ sonified, and one may well call them gods since they are invincible." (pp. 180-181) Theodora's last act as the priestess of Venus/Astarte is to show her contempt for his sudden championing of self-denial over passion by giving Venus the other crown too: "As the last word left her lips, she stretched out her hand and de­ liberately took my ring from the head of Shiva, put it above her own diamonds on the other idol, and laid the god I had chosen, the god of austerity and mortification, prostrate on its face, at the feet of the leering Venus" (p. I8l). Her 69 contempt for his wish to resist her is justified by later events; the tale concludes with the young man completely under her power: "My blood and pulses seemed beating as they do in a fever, my ears seemed full .of sounds, and that kiss burnt like the brand of hot iron on my lips" (p. 188). He retums from her to his room, and we last see him staring listlessly into the black, snovry night. Another prose piece, strange in its design, is R. Mur­ ray Gilchrist's "The Crimson Weaver." A blend of medieval allegory and fantasy, it tells of a knight in quest of his lost lady (roughly symbolizing noble love) who, along with his companion, foolishly ignores all the evil signs and en­ ters the domain of the Crimson Weaver. She, the satanic temptress, awaits her victim (whom she will seduce into sin and then destroy) at her palace, around which—in an obvious analogy to.Circe—"dogs and pigs with human limbs" sulk menacingly.-^ "'Once a man enters my domain,' she cries, 'he is mine'" (p. 273). She has the mysterious, sensual beauty' of the Cor­ rupter: ... a great door in front of the palace swung open, and a woman with a swaying walk came out to the terrace. ' She wore a robe of crimson. . . . Stooping, with sidelong motions of the head, she approached; bringing with her the smell of such an incense

58 ^ The Yellow Book. VI (July, 1895), 274. MMHI "?%«««: V

70 as when amidst Eastern herbs bums the corse. . . . She was perfect of feature as the Diana, but her skin was deathly white and her lips fretted with pain.

(p. 272) The opening hints of vampirism (her pallor and air of death) are confirmed in the remainder of the story. She is im­ mortal because she feeds on men. When the knight-errant disappears, his companion goes to the Crimson Weaver. She awaits him in a robe as "lustrous as freshly drawn blood" (p. 275). And when he asks the fate of his comrade, she leads him to her loom—at the foot of which lie the head and heart of her latest victim: Into her eyes came such a glitter as the moon makes on the moist skin of a sleeping snake. The firmness of her lips relaxed; they grew child-like in their soft­ ness. The atmosphere became almost tangible: I could scarce breathe. ... "I wear men's lives," the woman said. "Life is necessary to me, or even I—who have existed from the beginning—must die. But yesterday I feared the end, and he came. "• (p. 276) This macabre little tale ends with the vampire-temptress enchanting the surviving knight with her beauty and his forsaking his quest to remain with her. Another prose work, "The Secret" by T. I4ackenzie, is nothing more than the reverie of a man gazing at what must be a painting of Pandora. It has no plot in the strict sense of the word, but is, rather, an association of ideas about the picture, the model, and women in general. 71 A few select quotations are sufficient to catch the dreamy, slightly mysterious mood of the piece. It begins thus: Yes, you would have me know that it is within the little casket held level below your tiny, pointed chin, but you forget I can look into your solemn, omniscient eyes, and read that the secret lies within them too. Never was mystery more safe than in your keeping, you weird little creature, with eyes of a Sphinx and mouth of a baby. Was your secret known to the artist who painted you, to hid who gave you that thrilling look, over-teeming with what you can never tell?59

Soon, he begins to see her as a cruel, rather heartless, thing: Have you no compassion for us poor humanity, with our infinite capacity for needing, that you should sur- taunt us with that inexorable look of denial? You glory in your power, there is satisfaction about your lips, and you hold the casket lightly to show that it is hope­ lessly beyond our reach. . . . I wonder did you ever live on earth? Sometimes you seem to me to be a worldly little person, made to drive a man distracted for the want of you. It gives you more satisfaction to say No than Yes; your baby mouth may be willing and weak, yet your eyes are always stem, and see too far to care for what is near. (p. 234) Then, his thoughts move from the image on the canvas to the unknown model who posed for the painting. In his mind, her beauty gives her a unique position among women, and one which is not entirely without its sinister aspect: "For all trivial purpose in the world, surely of all maids you were most unfit. . . . That you lived is, I grant, a fair thought.

^^The Yellow Book, XI (October, I896), 232. 72 but that you should be and act as other women is an absurd one. Who ever possessed a personality like yours that you should be expected to resemble another?" (pp. 23^-235). He concludes with a bow to the feminine enigma: "... and I look up at my maiden with her Secret, and know that the greatest wisdom in the world is hers" (p. 236). While "The Secret" is hardly an unforgettable piece of writing, it does point to an aspect of the fertile fatale syndrome worth noting: her presence in Victorian art. One has but to glance through a volume of Pre- Raphaelite art to see how frequently she was the subject of their thoughts and efforts. Rossetti's work alone is indica­ tive of her appeal. Among a multitude of similar works, we find these: "The Merciless Lady," "Guenevere," "Lucretia Borgia," "Medusa," "Rosamund," "Helen of Troy," "LadyLilith," "Pandora," "Astarte Syriaca," and "Proserpine." In France as well as in England, Salome, Medea, Circe, Cleopatra, Lilith—in short^ all of myth and history's most terrible beauties—were resurrected in oils by such kindred spirits as William Morris, Frederick Sandys, Simeon Solomon, Theodore Chasseriau, Gustav Moreau (whose "Salome" inspired Huysmans' powerful description in A Rebours). Bume-Jones, Puvis de Chavannes, and Folicien Hops. Tall, slender, pale, vrith a

For a collection of Rossetti's paintings, see H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, I899). 73 long sensuous neck, languid eyes, and abundant hair, she hardly seems to vary from painting to painting.^ By the 'nineties, the Pre-Raphaelites (while still an important influence to the artistic.climate) were no longer active as individuals. Instead, younger artists such as VJill Rothenstein, Charles Condor, Aubrey Beardsley, Patten Wilson, Prances Macdonald, and Herbert McNair were adapting the concept of the demon-lover to fit the style of England's fin de siecle. The large and elaborate oils which the Pre-Raphaelites favored during the 'sixties and 'seven­ ties gave way to pen and ink illustrations. Beardsley, art editor for both The YellovT Book and The Savoy, set the style for the Decadent artist with his drawings of satanic, blood­ less women who leer at the viewer from phantasmagorial back­ grounds. The "Beardsley Woman" possessed a diabolic beauty: The consciousness of sin is always there, but it is sin first transfigured by beauty, and then disclosed by beauty; sin, conscious of itself, of its inability to escape itself, and showing in its ugliness the law it has broken. ... It is the soul in them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. Their

"^The mystique of the Pre-Raphaelite Woman was slow to fade. In The Romantic '90s (London, 1951)r P. 74, Richard Le Gallienne tells of a visit he made in 1924 to Jane Burden, the widow of William Morris and the model for so many of the Brotherhood's paintings. As he was leaving, she gave him a jar of quince jam which, she informed him, she had made her­ self. Le Gallienne never quite recovered: "A jar of quince jam made by the beautiful lady whom Morris had loved and Rossetti had paintedl It was like receiving it at the hands of Helen of Troy. " 7k bodies are faint and eager with wantonness; they desire more pleasure than there is in the world, fiercer and more exquisite pains, a more intolerable suspense. . . . Here, then, v:s I'iave a sort of abstract spiritual corruption., revealed in beautiful form; sin transfigured by beauty.°2 Not the least curious aspect of the fe^iL^is fatale motif is the suddenness of its end. With the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, the roof caved in on the Art for Art's Sake Movement in England. The Philistines which for so long had been an object of contempt were victorious, with the result that almost overnight the fin de siecle sideshow folded. The offices of The Yellow Book were stoned, all of Wilde's plays were taken off the boards, and the Aesthetes' hobby of eos-ter le bourpceois was suddenly a most unwise pastime. The sense of sin which la, volupte captured and symbolized ceased to be fashionable in either literature or art. Thus, by 1900, the Decadent spirit with its extravagance was largely a thing of the past.

° Symons, Complete Works. IX, 98-99. CHAPTER IV

CONCLUSION

The ardor of red flame is thine. And thine the steely soul of ice; Thou poisonest the fair design Of nature. . . .

—Lionel Johnson The significance of the farr^rr^e fatale does not lie in any innate worth as a subject. Nor does it lie in the qual­ ity of works she inspired. Indeed, with but few exceptions, the literature and art in which she figures is quite second- rate. The reason is obvious. A fusion of consummate beauty with consummate evil, la. volupte must be approached with a restraint noticeably lacking in most artists"who would be attracted by such a theme. Thus, in the hands of the less talented writers particularly, the fenne fatale too frequently lapses into the ludicrous and melodramatic. She is so ex­ cessively sinful- that she seems to be a burlesque of sin. But as I see it, the importance of the femme fatale does not depend upon her artistic validity, but rather upon her validity as a unifying agent and symbol of the Art for Art's Sake Movement. As a unifying agent, the femme fatale seems pecu­ liarly qualified. For nearly four decades, she remained virtually unchanged in either basic conception or execution. For this reason, once her identity has been established in

75 76 the reader's mind, she effectively acts to link together the many (and often confusing) divisions of the Art for Art's Sake Movement: Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthete, Decadent, fin de siecle. Symbolist, Art Nouveau, and so,on. By the same token, la. volupte provides one means to ascertain similarities of attitude, thought, and style between the individual artists within these divisions. As a symbol, the fer::'-^e fatale is an accurate and succinct projection of the Decadent (or Art for Art's Sake) spirit. She springs from and embodies the Decadent tempera­ ment: love of the exotic, the outre, the unique sensation. Sjrnthesized in her are the fantasies and frivolities of artists whose minds abhorred "the common emotions of human­ ity /and/ the ordinary associations of ideas," and whose imaginations were "sensitive to none but superfine sensa­ tions . . . and sensual phenomena." ^ Finally, the femme fatale reveals the greatest weak­ ness of the Aesthetic temperament: its too great love for shocking the middle classes and all Victorian convention. The numbing repetition of the avatar, the sameness of pre­ sentation, the continued emphasis on the same character­ istics of sin and depravity—all indicate that to epater le "hnnrgeois became for the Decadent an end in itself. In

•^Huysmans, Against the Grain, p. 301. 77 her own way, la. volupte came to be every bit as dull and conventional as those monstrously noble heroines so spurned by all the artists of the Decadent bent. In rebelling against the stereotyped treatments of women in Victorian literature, these artists merely created another stereotype— and one who, in her own way, was even more divorced from reality than her saccharin cousins. The great irony of the Art for Art's Sake Movement is exposed by the plethora of be jeweled, vampiric temptresses which the reader finds every­ where in it: the Movement rejected the idea of art as the moral instructor of men only to use it all too frequently for an even less dignified end—to offend, embarrass, and irritate the Victorian public. A SELECTED BIBLIOGR/.PrlY

Angeli, Helen R. Pre-R^.Tphaelite Tyjlirht. London, 1954. Barlow, Norman H. Sainte-Beuve to Baudelaire. Durham, N. C, 1964. Bate, Percy K. The Hn^lish Pre-Raphaelite Painters. London, 1899. Beers, Kenry A. A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1901. Bennett, Joseph D, Ba-adelaire: A Criticism. Princeton, 1944. Bessant, Walter. London in the Nineteenth Century. London, 1909. Buckley, Jerome. The Victorian Tender. New York, 1964. C]iarlesworth, Barbara. Dark Pr^ssan-es: The Decadent Con­ sciousness in Victorian Literature. I'iadison, Wis. , 193T Doughty, Oswald. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Victorian Honan- tic. New Haven, 1949. Erskine, John. Venus, the Lonely Goddess. New York, 1949. Gregory, Horace. Helen in Egypt. New York,.19^1. Heilbroner, Robert L. The Worldly Philosophers. New York, 1953. Huysmans, J. K. Against the Grain. New York, 1931. Trans­ lator's name not given. Hyder, Clyde Kenneth. STjinburne Replies. Syracuse, I966. Jackson, Holbrook. The Eighteen Nineties. New York, 1913. Laver, James. Manners and Morals in the Age of ODtimism: 1848-191^ New York, I966. Le Gallienne, Richard. The Romantic '90s. London, I926. Levine, George. The Ener.c:ence of Victorian Consciousness. London, I967.

78 79 Macfall, Haldane. Aubrey Beardsley. New York, 19^7. Marillier, H. C. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London, I899. Moulton, Louise Chandler. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: His Life and Work. London, 1894. O'Shaughnessy, Arthur. Music and Moonlight. London, I874. O'Shaughnessy, Arthur. Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy. ed. William Percy. New Haven, I923. Pater, Walter. The Complete Works of Walter Pater. 10 vols. London, I9IO. Patmore, Coventry. The Poems of Coventry Patmore. ed. Frederick Page. London, 19^9. Phillips, M. and W. S. Tomkin.son. English Women in Life and Letters. Oxford, I926. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Complete Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. ed. William Rossetti. 2 vols. London, iM^;^ Ruskin,. John. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderbum. 39 vols. London, 1903-1912. Seltman, Charles. Women in Antiquity. London, 195^. Smith, Cyril J. Tradition of Eve. San"Antonio, I96I. Starkie, Enid. From Gautier to Eliot. London, I96O. Swinburne, Algernon. The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinbume. ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, 20 vols. London, 1925-19^7. Symons, Arthur. The Collected Works of Arthur Symons. 9 vols. London, 1924. Turquet-Milnes, G. The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England. London, I913. Twain, Mark. Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard De Voto. New York, 1938. Welby, T. Earle. The Victorian Romantics: 1850-1870. London, I929. 80 Welland, D S. R. The Pre--R^t)haelites in Literature and Art. London, I953. "~ The. Yellow Book. London, I894-I897.