{"id":1315,"date":"2017-11-03T04:52:44","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T01:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=1315"},"modified":"2017-11-03T04:52:44","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T01:52:44","slug":"oscar-wilde-as-a-classicist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1315\/oscar-wilde-as-a-classicist\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscar Wilde as a Classicist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpts from Daniel Mendelsohn’s, Oscar Wilde, Classics Scholar<\/a>, reviewing The Women of Homer, by Oscar Wilde, edited by Thomas Wright and Donald Mead, and the \u2028Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde<\/a>, by Thomas Wright.<\/p>\n

— — —<\/p>\n

Like a character in one of the Greek tragedies Oscar Wilde was able to translate so fluently as a student, his short life followed a spectacular trajectory from fame to infamy, from the heady triumphs of his post-Oxford days, when he was already famous enough to be lampooned by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, to the dreadful peripeteia of the trials and imprisonment. But to some of those who knew him at the time, Wilde\u2019s emphatic rejection of the scholarly life must have come as something of a surprise.<\/p>\n

He had, after all, shown a remarkable flair for the classics from the start. At the Portora Royal School, where he\u2019d been sent in the autumn of 1864, just before his tenth birthday, he won the classical medal examination with his extempore translations from Aeschylus\u2019 Agamemnon (the tragedy he loved above all others) and the Carpenter Prize for his superior performance on the examination on the Greek New Testament. Later, at Trinity College, Dublin, he took a first in his freshman classical exams and went on to win the Berkeley Gold Medal for his paper on a subject that was, perhaps, not without augury: the Fragmenta comicorum graecorum, \u201cFragments of the Greek Comics,\u201d the great scholarly edition by the early-nineteenth-century German philologue Augustus Meineke. (According to his friend Robert Sherard, he occasionally pawned the medal when he needed money, but managed always to redeem it, keeping it until the end of his life.)<\/p>\n

Wilde\u2019s activities immediately following his departure from Oxford suggest, if anything, a certain unwillingness to abandon the domain of \u201cdried-up old dons.\u201d While scrounging for ways to keep himself employed, he wrote his old friend George Macmillan, of the publishing family, offering to take on projects that would have daunted full-blown classics scholars twice his age: a new translation of Herodotus, a new edition of Euripides\u2019 Madness of Hercules and Phoenician Maidens. He applied, unsuccessfully, for an archaeology scholarship; he had a hand in an 1880 production of Agamemnon that was attended by Browning and Tennyson.<\/p>\n

Of that Wilde, the extant record affords us only a few tantalizing glimpses: a university prize essay, an unsigned review article, journeyman\u2019s pieces that nonetheless reveal a characteristic bravura. This partial view has occasionally been enlarged over the years by the publication of fascinating bits of juvenilia (\u201cHellenism,\u201d a fragmentary set of notes about Spartan civilization, was published only in 1979). Now we have The Women of Homer, a substantial although unfinished paper on Homer\u2019s female characters that reminds us once more how strongly Wilde\u2019s classical training underpinned the sensibility that would make him so famous.<\/p>\n

Wilde\u2019s copy of the Nichomachean Ethics, dated 1877, contains this suggestive gloss on the text: <\/p>\n

\u201cMan makes his end for himself out of himself: no end is imposed by external considerations, he must realize his true nature, must be what nature orders, so must discover what his nature is.\u201d <\/p>\n

While still at Trinity, Wilde was asked on one exam to translate a fragment of a text about Odysseus into Elizabethan prose, and then was required to translate selections from Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and Matthew Arnold into Greek.<\/p>\n

Luckily, Wilde, whose linguistic abilities were certainly formidable\u2014years later, a former Portora schoolmate recalled his ability to \u201cgrasp the nuances of the various phases of the Greek Middle Voice and of the vagaries of Greek conditional clauses\u201d\u2014was to fall into the hands of the right professors. His Trinity master was the Reverend J.P. Mahaffy, a distinguished classicist who had a special interest in later Greek antiquity, and who was, too, a celebrated wit\u2014a quality that must have appealed to his young student. (Informed that the current tenant of an academic post he coveted was ill, Mahaffy replied, \u201cNothing trivial, I hope?\u201d)<\/p>\n

In an 1874 book called Social Life in Greece, Mahaffy argued for a vision of the Greeks and their civilization as something more than a mausoleum of culture, \u201cmere treasure-houses of roots and forms to be sought out by comparative grammarians.\u201d Among other things, he showed a refreshing willingness to dust off contemporary attitudes toward one Hellenic institution that would have had a special if secret resonance for Wilde: homosexuality. \u201cThere is no field of enquiry,\u201d Mahaffy wrote in Social Life in Greece, \u201cwhere we are so dogmatic in our social prejudices, and so determined by the special circumstances of our age and country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mahaffy\u2019s advocacy of a living engagement with the civilization of the Mediterranean\u2014still somewhat of a novelty at the time\u2014would land the young Wilde in trouble. In the spring of 1877 he accompanied his former professor on a trip to Italy and Greece; after returning to Oxford several weeks late in the term, Wilde was \u201crusticated\u201d\u2014forced to leave university for the duration of term. The irony of being temporarily expelled from his classics curriculum for having immersed himself in the Greek world was not lost on the future master of the epigram, who observed that he \u201cwas sent down from Oxford for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Oxford that punished the unrepentant Wilde had, in fact, been shaking off the old ways, transformed by the energetic reforms of Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek, Master of Balliol, and translator of Plato. It was Jowett who insisted that Greats include important currents in contemporary thought (as a young man he had been devoted to Kant); who saw, indeed, the classics as a natural conduit for modern liberal thought. Instrumental in shifting the emphasis of the curriculum from Roman to Greek authors, he made Plato central to it; not coincidentally, the philosopher\u2019s dialectical method was embodied in the intimate one-on-one tutorial system.<\/p>\n

The special Platonic emphasis at Oxford was clearly what animated Wilde\u2019s later, admiring characterization of the curriculum as one in which one can be, simultaneously, brilliant and unreasonable, speculative and well-informed, creative as well as critical, and write with all the passion of youth about the truths which belong to the august serenity of old age.<\/p>\n

Here, perhaps, is the root of the characteristically Wildean taste for entwining ostensibly incompatible qualities. His work encompassed, sometimes uneasily, what he saw as his \u201cGothic\u201d and \u201cGreek\u201d sides, veering between a grandiose Romanticism and an astringent Classicism, the fusty nineteenth-century melodrama of most of his theater and the crisp modernism of his critical thought.<\/p>\n

Mahaffy and Jowett weren\u2019t the only Hellenists advocating a profoundly engaged approach to the classics during the latter half of the nineteenth century. During Wilde\u2019s time at Oxford the literary critic and poet John Addington Symonds was publishing his two-volume Studies of the Greek Poets (1873, 1876). While their earnestness and dogged effort at comprehensiveness may have been exhaustingly typical of mid-Victorian criticism, these volumes were particularly celebrated (or derided) for their unusually passionate, personal, and florid style: a style that hinted at a more than purely academic degree of investment in the subject, and suggested, once again, that the Greeks could have more than a \u201cdry as dust\u201d meaning for the present day. <\/p>\n

The Women of Homer now takes its place as the earliest of several youthful classical writings that amply display a precocious intellectual and critical aplomb. A disjointed mass of notes and paragraphs that Wilde produced in about 1877 was edited a century later into a misleadingly finished-looking \u201cessay\u201d called \u201cHellenism.\u201d However unoriginal this account of Spartan culture often is, it sometimes betrays a shrewd and crisply unsentimental appreciation of the Greeks and their qualities\u2014such shrewdness and lack of sentimentality being the very qualities that mark the \u201cGreek\u201d facets of Wilde\u2019s own work. Not the least interesting of its assertions is that the Greek city-states\u2019 \u201cselfish feeling of exclusive patriotism, this worship of the \u03c0\u03cc\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2 [polis, city-state] as opposed to the \u03c0\u03ac\u03c4\u03c1\u03b9\u03b1 [patria, homeland]\u201d\u2014the quality with which the nineteenth-century admirers of Rome typically reproached the squabbling Greeks\u2014was, in fact, the key to the Greek cultural achievement. It was this \u201cselfishness\u201d that, as Wilde saw it, saved the Greeks \u201cfrom the mediocre sameness of thought and feeling which seems always to exist in the cities of great empires.\u201d<\/p>\n

The authority and highly defined taste, the willingness to attack established scholars and to propose startlingly original interpretations, that distinguish \u201cHellenism,\u201d the Chancellor\u2019s Essay, and the Britannica article of 1879 are evident in The Women of Homer, which Wilde began when he was not quite twenty-two. It is remarkable, not least, for standing in refreshing contrast to the platitudinous moonings of Symonds himself, who is unable to see the preeminent female characters in Homer\u2014Helen, Penelope, and the maiden Nausicaa\u2014as anything but cartoon figures representing conventional types of femininity.<\/p>\n

Wilde\u2019s reaction to Symonds\u2019s text reveals the same astringent rigor that characterizes his attack on Jebb. He begins with an impatient scholarly complaint, criticizing Symonds\u2019s failure to include all the relevant texts in his discussion of Helen (not least, the speech by the classical sophist Isocrates known as the \u201cEncomium of Helen\u201d). What makes Wilde\u2019s essay really fascinating, though, are the flashes of his own distinctively sharp and original interpretative acumen.<\/p>\n

In his discussion of Helen, Symonds had argued that a lost trilogy about her by Sophocles would have presented her as \u201ca woman whose character deserved the most profound analysis\u201d\u2014an assumption wholly in keeping with the contemporary assessment of that playwright as the master of character. To this Wilde retorts, startlingly but with some justice, that \u201cprofound analysis\u201d is not necessarily to be expected of the great Athenian dramatist in the case of Antigone: \u201cI hardly think that the drawing of Antigone in the play of that name justifies the expression \u2018profound analysis.\u2019\u201d And he is right: the Theban princess, while a powerful figure, is not a subtle one. The Women of Homer offers a number of such bracing zingers.<\/p>\n

By far the most arresting observation that Wilde makes in his response to Symonds\u2019s catalog of Homeric women is one concerning Penelope, the character about whom Symonds shows himself to be the least perceptive. Wilde remarks on what he calls an \u201cextremely subtle psychological point\u201d that Homer makes about her personality, one that \u201cshows that Homer had accurately studied the nature of women.\u201d Rather than being the placid homebody that Symonds insists she is, Penelope, Wilde understands, is in fact strangely liberated by her famous dilemma: the interminable courtship of her by the suitors during Odysseus\u2019 absence awakens and sharpens in her the very qualities that make her an ideal mate for her husband. (Symonds simply finds her acts of cunning irritating: \u201cprovocative of anger.\u201d) Those twenty years without Odysseus may have been lonely, but by the same token they place Penelope squarely at center stage. \u201cThough his return was the consummation,\u201d Wilde writes, with a psychological insight that would be remarkable in someone much older and more experienced than an undergraduate in his early twenties, \u201cyet it was in some way the breaking up of her life; for her occupation was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Homer, if not Symonds, clearly recognizes this, giving Penelope a number of scenes that show that she is in many ways ambivalent about the suitors\u2014whose attentions, the poet hints, she unconsciously enjoys. In Book 19, for instance, Odysseus\u2019 queen famously takes the mysterious beggar\u2014actually Odysseus in disguise\u2014into her confidence, telling him about a dream she has had in which a mountain eagle attacks twenty tame geese she has lovingly kept: there is no question that the geese are meant to represent the suitors, and the eagle, Odysseus.<\/p>\n

Wilde bewails the failure of Symonds and so many other contemporary critics to recognize this conflicted aspect of Penelope\u2019s character:<\/p>\n

It is entirely misunderstood, however, by Mr Symonds and, indeed, by all other writers I have read. It shows us how great was her longing, how terrible the anguish of her soul, and it makes her final recognition of [Odysseus] doubly impressive.<\/p>\n

The private desire behind the public repudiation, the anguished dissolution triggered by a long-awaited \u201cconsummation\u201d: Wilde\u2019s ability to discern, beneath the attitudes imposed on women by society, the sharp and surprising contours of unexpected emotions is what would make The Importance of Being Earnest the most original and most artistically successful of his works.<\/p>\n

\u201cEntirely misunderstood\u2026by all other writers I have read.\u201d The breathtaking self-assurance of this pronouncement suggests why Wilde\u2019s long-forgotten text is intriguing, for reasons other than the glimpse it gives us of the road not taken by a significant cultural figure. The confrontation between Wilde and Symonds is, in the end, a confrontation between two eras. In Wilde\u2019s dismissal of Symonds and the rest, you can already hear not only the voice of the mature writer, blithely dismissing the intellectual and social conventions of his age, but the voice of an as yet unborn criticism, one particularly willing to question prevailing assumptions about style, canons, and gender. Like the best of his mature work, this juvenile piece seems to leapfrog forward from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Not the least of the twentieth-century phenomena that Wilde so uncannily anticipated was the cult of celebrity; and indeed, soon after deciding against a career as a classicist, he was making his first serious effort at courting international fame. During his 1882 tour of America, he was already showing a shrewd understanding of the uses to which that most Greek of literary forms, the epigram, might be put in the age of the telegram and the newspaper. (\u201cHis sayings are telegraphed all over the world,\u201d the Pall Mall Gazette bemusedly reported of Wilde\u2019s American visit.) If he invoked the Greeks at all in his American interviews it was to compliment a local poet:<\/p>\n

Whitman is a great writer\u2026. There is more of the Greek residing in him than in any modern poet. His poetry is Homeric in its large pure delight of men and woman, and in the joy the writer has and shows through it all in the sunshine and breeze of outdoor life.<\/p>\n

But as we know, it was in Wilde himself more than anyone that the Greek spirit resided. If no one today seriously wishes that Wilde had become an Oxford classics don, it\u2019s at least in part because his own \u201cGreekness\u201d\u2014the deep understanding of the rhetorical uses of style, the taste for piquant syllogism, the ever-evolving aversion to sentimentality (which reached its apogee in Earnest), and, in the end, the tragic understanding of the meaning of suffering\u2014made itself felt so strongly in the work he produced as a poet, writer, and dramatist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpts from Daniel Mendelsohn’s, Oscar Wilde, Classics Scholar, reviewing The Women of Homer, by Oscar Wilde, edited by Thomas Wright and Donald Mead, and the \u2028<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[317,12],"tags":[211,34,79,95,1406,408,83,72,249,94,3220,5683,818,44,77],"class_list":["post-1315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greek-language","category-modern-literature","tag-aeschylus","tag-culture","tag-euripides","tag-greek","tag-greeks","tag-hellenism","tag-herodotus","tag-homer","tag-homosexuality","tag-new-testament","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-plato","tag-poetry","tag-socrates","tag-sophocles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}