[In the following essay, Martin discusses Taylor's use of pastoral settings and classical themes in his treatment of homosexuality.]

I know … a great valley, bounded by a hundred miles of snowy peaks; lakes in its bed; enormous hillsides, dotted with groves of ilex and pine; orchards of orange and olive; a perfect climate, where it is bliss enough just to breathe, and freedom from the distorted laws of men, for none are near enough to enforce them! If there is no legal way of escape for you, here, at least, there is no force which can drag you back, once you are there: I will go with you, and perhaps—perhaps …¹

Thus Joseph's friend Philip speaks to him in Bayard Taylor's novel, Joseph and His Friend, probably the first American novel to speak openly of love between men and of the search for a place where that love could be expressed. Philip's valley of bliss and freedom is clearly drawn from the pastoral conventions, which offered for the nineteenth century homosexual artist one of the very few possible models for the literary expression of deep friendship and love between men. In Theocritus, in Virgil, in Barnfield, and in Marlowe the homosexual artist might find some confirmation that his emotional needs were not unique, that they had been known by others, and had indeed been given a place of honor in the literature.

At the same time Taylor seems to have recognized that the pastoral dream is in fact no solution for mid-19th century America. He identified the pastoral with California, both in the passage above and in his poem “On Leaving California,” which evokes the famous “middle ground” of pastoral,² somewhere between civilization and the wilderness:

Thy human children shall restore the grace
          Gone with thy fallen pines:
The wild, barbaric beauty of thy face
          Shall round to classic lines.
And Order, Justice, Social Law shall curb
          Thy untamed energies;
And Art and Science, with their dreams superb,
          Replace thine ancient ease.(3)

Although he asserts that “Earth shall find her old Arcadian dream / Restored again in thee,” his work as a whole clearly indicates that Bayard Taylor moved from a belief that happiness could be achieved by flight from America and by immersion in an alien culture to a conviction that the ideal state of the future might be found closer to home. The establishment of such an ideal state, which would include a place for homosexual love, required a change in men rather than a change in place.

Taylor's use of the pastoral theme in Joseph and His Friend reflects a modification of his earlier views, one that is important for a study of the development of a homosexual consciousness. Taylor established his reputation as a travel writer, and his reports from abroad filled a growing appetite for the exotic and the romantic. He provided landscapes of the Far North, the Orient, the Middle East, Africa, always with a sense of adventure and romance. In his homely fashion he did for American literature what French painters such as Delacroix were doing—offering the new bourgeoisie dreams of travel and excitement, ways of spending their new affluence, and of countering the boredom of everyday life. For Taylor travel fulfilled a moral purpose as well: it extended the moral options open to a mid-nineteenth century American man and permitted the expression of ideas that were inconceivable at home. (Taylor's rural, Pennsylvania Quaker background was stifling and repressive, to judge by his fiction, in part because his Quakers seem indistinguishable from the neighboring Amish.) Taylor's travel narratives permitted him to describe Turkish baths, hashish smoking, dancing girls, drunken brawls, and pretty Arab boys without fear of censorship: he was merely reporting on exotic customs. The travel books thus served a function not unlike some early forms of pornography. Under the guise of science, they offered erotic titillation.

Taylor's poetry often used similar strategies. His most successful book was his Poems of the Orient (1854), with its “To a Persian Boy,” subtitled “In the Bazaar at Smyrna.”⁴ The poem draws upon its Persian setting but also upon a tradition of Persian love poetry, often addressed to boys.⁵ In other words, the poet indicates that his tribute to the beauty of a boy is a literary exercise, prompted by the scene. As a consequence of this strategy, the poem communicates on two levels: it appears as a minor literary exercise to the conventional reader, and at the same time conveys to the more observant reader Taylor's attraction for “the wonder of thy beauty.” Still, in this very early poem (first published in 1851), Taylor does not concentrate on the specifics of the boy's beauty, but uses the poem as a means of expressing his taste for the East in terms that suggest a moral contrast with America: “From under thy dark lashes shone on me / The rich, voluptuous soul of Eastern land.” But it is precisely the voluptuousness, the frank sensuality of the East that appeals. Taylor's own travels may well often have served as a means for him to experience such voluptuousness at first hand. For, like his friend Herman Melville, Taylor may have felt that true pleasure, particularly pleasure between men, could only be found in another land, where the burden of rigid moral codes was less heavy.

In another poem, “Hylas,” Taylor adopted a different strategy. Here the convention is Greek, not Persian, but Taylor is able to express a sensual response to a young man by appearing to imitate a classical legend. Since the story of Hylas is told by Theocritus (in Idyll XIII), Taylor can justify his loving portrayal of the boy by reference to the homosexual content of Theocritus's works and to the conventions of Greek romance. He can thus appear to be merely the translator, as it were, and so enjoy the sensuality without avowing it fully. Within the poem itself, the strategy of the poet is one we might call the “Leander” strategy, in honor of its most famous use by Marlowe. In this delightful, unfinished poem, Marlowe diverts the reader's attention from the story itself—the love of the youth Leander for the priestess Hero—to a subplot involving the rape of Leander by Jove, who mistakes him for Ganymede. The subplot is far more interesting than the plot itself, since it comes much closer to Marlowe's own sexuality, but it is still contained within an acceptably heterosexual frame. (Something of the same tension between heterosexual plot and homosexual subplot may be observed in Marlowe's plays as well, to a much smaller degree in Shakespeare's plays, and, more recently, in most of Forster's novels, including The Longest Journey and Passage to India.) In the case of the story of Hylas, the original legend is itself largely homosexual, concerned with the love of Hercules for Hylas and Hylas's drowning at the hands of the nymphs. But it also offers the possibility for the celebration of male beauty.

In fact, Taylor suspends his narrative long enough to linger over the form of young Hylas:

Naked, save one light robe that from his shoulder
Hung to his knee, the youthful flush revealing
Of warm, white limbs, half-nerved with coming
          manhood,
Yet fair and smooth with tenderness of
          beauty.

Taylor places Hylas at exactly the point preferred by the Greeks, the brief moment of flowering before the first signs of manhood (in Greek pederasty, the younger lover lost his charm the moment he began to grow a beard):

                                                            manhood's blossom
Not yet had sprouted on his chin, but freshly
Curved the fair cheek, and full the red lips, parting,
Like a loose bow, that just has launched its arrow.
His large blue eyes, with joy dilate and beamy,
Were clear as the unshadowed Grecian heaven;
Dewy and sleek his dimpled shoulders rounded
To the white arms and whiter breast between them.
Downward, the supple lines had less of softness:
His back was like a god's; his loins were moulded
As if some pulse of power began to waken.(6)

There is considerable power in these lines and in their evocation of the barely confined erotic strength of the youth. Taylor's language is, as usual, highly uneven. His simile for the lips is, if extravagant, effective and sensual, but his image for the eyes, “dilate and beamy,” can only be called awkward. The last line cited above, with its strong iambic beat and effective use of short, heavy words and the repeated p, conveys well the effect that Taylor is seeking, however. In such moments his verse almost seems to come alive, to be awakened from its own lethargy.

Taylor's most recent critic has argued that this poem is “about nothing important; it has no reverberating echoes or suggestions of larger meaning. It comes close to being ‘pure poetry,’ for it is unrelated to anything else, including human experience.”⁷ While one can understand the reasons for such a statement, and even see a certain truth in it, it is only a half-truth originating in the critic's inability to imagine what Taylor's poem tries to do. He apparently does not see that the story of the death-nymphs and their victory over the body of the beautiful boy is a major element in homosexual mythology. This story has remained one of the most important myths for homosexuals because it “explains” the transformation of the young lover into a heterosexual and hence his loss. Read mythically, the story says: Hercules loves Hylas until the day that Hylas is about to become a man; at that point he becomes attractive to women who seduce him and thereby kill him; Hercules is left mourning for a lost love. The myth blames women for their destruction of homosexual love, as in the story of Orpheus, or more recently in Eliot's “Prufrock.” It also portrays homosexuality as a lost ideal, a state once enjoyed but now vanished, which one can only recapture in the imagination. Such a reading of the myth clearly underlies Taylor's adoption of it. Taylor's “Hylas” is indeed related to human experience: it is deeply related to Taylor's understanding of himself as a homosexual. His choice of the Hylas myth as a poetic subject is part of an attempt at self-definition as well as part of an attempt to situate himself in a poetic tradition which will justify his own emotional life. The failure of the poem comes from Taylor's inability to avow fully his real subject: the love of Hercules for Hylas, and, through that, the author's own love for young men. In Marlowe wit and humor carry the day. For the sentimental Taylor there can be no such baroque pleasures. His language is luxuriant but finally vague; unable to depict directly the body of love, it wanders off into a succession of similes.

The importance of the myth of Hylas for Taylor and his circle is clear. In 1852 Richard Henry Stoddard published his Poems, which he “dedicated to my friend, Bayard Taylor, whom I admire as a poet and love as a man.” In that volume also appeared Stoddard's “Arcadian Idyl,” depicting an encounter between Lycidas and Theocritus and illustrating the differences between two personalities and two poetic styles. Most of the poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by Lycidas, who recalls the rivalry between himself and his brother-poet, of whom he says: “I have a friend as different from myself, / As Hercules from Hylas, his delight.”⁸ Lycidas is the spirit of Pan—earth-bound, delicate, gentle, soft, compared to a fawn or a dove; Theocritus is the spirit of Apollo—stern, rugged, and wild, an eagle to Lycidas's nightingale. The idyl might seem a mere literary exercise if one did not remember that in the dedicatory “Proem” to Taylor's Poems of the Orient, addressed to Stoddard, Taylor declared that Apollo “is your God, but mine is shaggy Pan”.⁹ Thus it is clear that Stoddard and Taylor thought of themselves as Theocritus and Lycidas, both consciously pastoral models, and that they could also speak of their relationship in terms of Hercules and Hylas. Such references were no simple literary allusion, but functioned as an active part of the way these men saw themselves. The circle included others as well. In 1869 Edmund Clarence Stedman dedicated his The Blameless Prince and Other Poems¹⁰ to Richard Henry Stoddard and included his “Hylas” (called a translation) as well as a sonnet to Bayard Taylor. Two years later Stoddard's The Book of the East and Other Poems¹¹ included his sonnet to Stedman, “With Shakespeare's Sonnets,” regretting that they lived “an age too late” for the world Shakespeare evoked in his sonnet, “where love and friendship blend.”

Although the homosexual circle of genteel poets to which Taylor, Stoddard, and Stedman belonged cast its work most often in classical and pastoral molds or exploited exotic scenes and Shakespearean allusions, Taylor increasingly moved away from these strategies toward a greater directness. This change was reflected in part by Taylor's shift, beginning in the 1860s, from writing poetry and travel narratives to writing distinctly realistic fiction. His fiction may have been influenced by a more general change in taste, as a concern for detail and the picturesque increasingly replaced a taste for the colossal and sublime. One can see this shift in the arts, for instance, in an important early work of realism such as Whistler's Twelve Etchings From Nature (1859). But there may also have been a more specific source in the work of Whitman, who seems likely to have influenced Taylor toward adopting a realistic form for his treatment of homosexual love. With the realistic treatment of character and setting came not only a new concern for social issues but also an interest in homosexual rights, which replaced what had previously been a concern simply for male beauty.

The world of the East had been an important element in Taylor's development and self-definition. As he put it in “L’Envoi” to Poems of the Orient,

I found among those Children of the Sun,
          The cipher of my nature,—the release
Of baffled powers, which else had never won
          That free fulfillment, whose reward is peace.(12)

The theme of the Northerner discovering a land of warmth, beauty, and love is familiar, of course, and one that very often has homosexual meaning.

It is probably nowhere better expressed than in Mann's “Death in Venice,” but Mann was himself drawing upon von Platen, and one could equally well cite Lawrence, Forster, von Gloeden, Gide, and many others, all of whose works link the ancient gods and an older, darker, civilization that remained in touch with the primitive sources of sensuality. For Taylor, journeys to the East provided a “cipher,” a way to understand his own nature and to realize his own sexuality. In the first stage of his development these experiences led to a dream of the recovery of lost innocence, a pastoral reverie:

The Poet said: I will here abide,
          In the Sun's unclouded door;
Here are the wells of all delight
          On the lost Arcadian shore. …(13)

In Joseph and His Friend Taylor specifically considered the Arcadian dream and rejected it, calling instead for social and personal change to alter the condition of the homosexual in America.

In this novel, his fourth, Taylor turned to the subject matter he knew best: life in southeastern Pennsylvania, where a quiet, conservative Quaker faith survived only a short distance from the urban cultural center of Philadelphia. He subtitled his novel “A Story of Pennsylvania,” thereby leading a number of critics to imagine that “rural life” or “rural poverty” is the subject of the novel. The realistic depiction of life in rural Pennsylvania is, in fact, only a backdrop for a story of homosexual love and homosexual identity. (Perhaps the critics who saw only the superficial elements to the story are to be preferred to an earlier critic who wrote, “It is an unpleasant story of mean duplicity and painful mistakes. The characters are shallow and the surroundings shabby. There is not a single pleasing situation or incident in the book.”¹⁴ With this brief judgment, a 300-page study of Taylor dismisses the novel.) Taylor clearly states his intentions in the preface and on the title page. Twice he quotes Shakespeare's Sonnet 144, which begins “Two loves I have,” citing the third and fourth lines,

The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.

His novel is an elaboration on this theme, a young man torn between two lovers, the “better” a man, the “worser” a woman. And his preface declares his intention to demonstrate “the truth and tenderness of man's love for man, as of man's love for woman.”¹⁵

The hero, Joseph Aster, who is undoubtedly partially autobiographical, is an early example of what would become a classic model for the homosexual in fiction well into the twentieth century. Joseph is “shy and sensitive,” an orphan living with his aunt and attached to his dead mother, cut off from the larger community, which Taylor depicts as “coarse” and “rude.” In the first section of the novel, Joseph yearns for companionship. But Taylor, significantly, does not view Joseph's timidity and awkwardness as failures in themselves, but as the products of a social and religious attitude that has taught him to reject his own body, which “they tell me to despise.” Joseph senses the goodness of his body and rejects the attitude of the community for the “comfort and delight” of the body. (It is interesting at this point to compare Taylor's very Whitman-like “The Bath,” with its opening lines:

Off, fetters of the falser life,—
          Weeds, that conceal the statue's form!
.....Now fall the thin disguises, planned
          For men too weak to walk unblamed:
Naked beside the sea I stand,—
          Naked and not ashamed.(16)

Here too Taylor recalls a symbolic undressing, which represents a conversion to the values of the truer, inner self.)

Joseph's extreme loneliness leads him to an engagement with Julia Blessing, a scheming, vain gold-digger. But on his way back from Philadelphia, where he is engaged, “All at once his eye was attracted by a new face,” a stranger in the train—Taylor makes clear the sexual nature of this attraction: “Joseph dropped his eyes in some confusion, but not until he had caught the full, warm, intense expression of those that met them.”¹⁷ At this critical juncture the train derails, and Joseph awakens in the arms of the stranger. For whatever reason, Taylor could not depict realistically the interaction between the two men and so relies instead on the almost-comic conventional device of the derailment. The stranger, Philip Held (his surname is German for hero) becomes a spokesman for a much more conscious homosexuality than the rather vague yearnings of Joseph. Held explains to Joseph, “there are needs which most men have, and go on all their lives hungering for, because they expect them to be supplied in a particular form.”¹⁸ Lacking a “form” for the expression of their love, “most men” settle for an exclusively heterosexual life and remain permanently unsatisfied. Philip becomes Joseph's mentor, and, incidentally, the first fictional spokesman for gay liberation in American literature.

Despite Joseph's marriage and a series of parallel subplots on the theme of hopeless love, Philip's confidence in the future is unshaken, and he declares: “there must be a loftier faith, a juster law, for the men—and the women—who cannot shape themselves according to the common-place pattern of society,—who are born with instincts, needs, knowledge, and rights—ay, rights—of their own!”¹⁹ In an age when homosexuals were not mentioned at all or were seen as repulsive sinners, Bayard Taylor created a hero who would defend the right to be different, different from birth on, and who would declare that such people have rights. “The world needs,” says Philip, “a new code of ethics. … But it would need more than a Luther for such a Reformation.”

At the end of the novel, Joseph goes off to the West in search of the valley of which he and Philip dream, an Edenic place of contentment and freedom where their love might finally find expression. But Bayard Taylor no longer believed that only one such place existed, nor that California alone offered it. And so Joseph writes back to Philip:

Philip, Philip, I have found your valley!

… there were lakes glimmering below; there were groves of ilex on the hillsides, an orchard of oranges, olives, and vines in the hollow, millions of flowers hiding the earth, pure winds, fresh waters, and remoteness from all conventional society. I have never seen a landscape so broad, so bright, so beautiful!²⁰

It is exactly the valley of which Philip had spoken, and if its “real” place is California, its literary place is Arcadia. But Joseph's spiritual growth has been such that he now recognizes the impossibility of believing that he and Philip can find love together by going there:

Yes, but we will only go there on one of these idle epicurean journeys of which we dream, and then to enjoy the wit and wisdom of our generous friend, not to seek a refuge from the perversions of the world! For I have learned another thing, Philip: the freedom we craved is not a thing to be found in this or that place. Unless we bring it with us, we shall not find it.²¹

With those words, Joseph spoke also for Bayard Taylor himself. Taylor was recounting his own growth in understanding. He too had begun by believing in a valley of bliss, a place somewhere out there, a new world where men might love each other without fear of conventional society. He gave expression to that belief in a literature of escapism, which sought a primitive Paradise not unlike Melville's Typee, but with the beauty of Greece—and Greek love—as well. (Indeed Melville called his island Golden Lands “authentic Edens in a pagan sea.”) One thinks of all the nineteenth-century, as well as twentieth-century, homosexuals travelling in quest of the great, good place: Melville in the South Seas, Stevenson in Samoa, T. E. Lawrence in Arabia, D. H. Lawrence in Mexico, André Gide in Tangiers, Oscar Wilde in Paris. Bayard Taylor recognized that homosexuals could only gain their freedom by creating a better world for themselves by daring to be free.

The search for a place for love had therefore to begin with the self. Taylor provides us with a memorable image of the two lovers:

They took each other's hands. The day was fading, the landscape was silent, and only the twitter of nesting birds was heard in the boughs above them. Each gave way to the impulse of his manly love, rarer, alas! but as tender and true as the love of women, and they drew nearer and kissed each other. As they walked back and parted on the highway, each felt that life was not wholly unkind, and that happiness was not yet impossible.²²

The image is undoubtedly romantic, even melodramatic by our standards, but how else was one to depict forbidden love? The convention of the time provided no form, no place for the love of two men, and so a writer who wanted to be honest found himself almost inevitably appealing to his readers' emotions as well as to their reason. One can see the same kind of thing in the romanticism of Forster's Maurice, written 40 years later and judged unpublishable, or that of Lawrence's novel of forbidden love, Lady Chatterly's Lover.

We can regret that we do not see Philip and Joseph together at the end of the novel, that Taylor can give us no idea of their life together. But we must also remember that this is because such a life was simply unimaginable. Taylor took the important first step. He liberated the literature of homosexuality from the pretense of Greek landscape. His characters are realistic and believable. They inhabit middle-class America. The birds that twitter above them are sparrows; not nightingales. He can bring Philip and Joseph to their “nest”; whether their offspring could learn to fly, he left to his successors.

Notes

1. Bayard Taylor, Joseph and His Friend, Household Edition (New York, 1875), p. 216. First edition published 1870.

2. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York, 1964) pp. 22-23.

3. “On Leaving California,” in Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor, Household Edition (Boston, 1883), pp. 92-93.

4. Poetical Works, pp. 62-63.

5. Line 12, for example, cites Hafiz.

6. Poetical Works, pp. 72-75.

7. Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor (New York, 1973), p. 115.

8. Richard Henry Stoddard, Poems (Boston, 1852), pp. 70-73.

9. Poems of the Orient (Boston, 1855), p. 10.

10. The Blameless Prince and Other Poems (Boston, 1869).

11. The Book of the East and Other Poems (Boston, 1871), p. 178.

12. Poems of the Orient, p. 161.

13. “The Poet in the East,” Poems of Orient, p. 21.

14. Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor (Boston, 1896), p. 177.

15. Joseph, preface.

16. “The Bath,” Poetical Works, pp. 90-91.

17. Joseph, pp. 90-91.

18. Ibid., p. 95.

19. Ibid., p. 214.

20. Ibid., p. 355.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., p. 217.