[In the following essay, Hersey notes that the novel Lothair of Benjamin Disraeli (Prime Minister [1867; 1874-80] as well as novelist) "gently mocked" the views on Aryanism of Lord Leighton (painter), and that Leighton's positioning of Aryanism against Semitism resembled the construction of Matthew Arnold's arguments on Hellenism versus Hebraism.]

The cult, or philosophy, of Aryanism has flourished at various times and in various places during the past 150 years. In Britain from the late 1860's through at least the early 1890's it manifested itself both in art and politics; and the appearance last year of these two books [Lord Leighton, by Leonée and Richard Ormond; and Lothair, by Benjamin Disraeli, edited by Vernon Bogdanor] raises the question of Aryanism's effect on two key Victorians: Frederick, Lord Leighton, the greatest "classical" painter of the period, and Benjamin Disraeli, who, after temporarily relinquishing the prime ministership, in 1870 wrote a novel in which Leighton and his Aryan beliefs were gently mocked. Though William Gaunt alluded to these matters in Victorian Olympus (1952) they have never received the study they deserve. Victorian Aryanism was a fascinating business—an episode of philosophical racism done up in imperialistic and neopagan trappings.

However neither Mr. Bogdanor in his introduction to Lothair nor the Ormonds in their monograph on Leighton take the opportunity to discuss the subject. Otherwise, I must immediately add, they have done well. Mr. Bogdanor's introduction and notes to the novel usefully identify the real-life characters who sat for Disraeli's portrayals—they range from Cardinal Manning to Bishop Wilberforce—though it is perhaps less essential to be told by Mr. Bogdanor who St. Michael is, or what happens when someone's face "mantles with emotion." Mr. Bogdanor also supplies a bibliography and a chronology of Disraeli's life. The book is well produced and a pleasure to read. Lord Leighton, meanwhile, is a typical Mellon Centre book—sumptuous in appearance if somewhat shallow in substance. Yet it should be warmly welcomed. It contains a large amount of new, or newly accessible, information about this interesting man, his work, and his circle. It sets the scene for further research, one aspect of which, surely, will deal with Leighton's Aryanism.

Aryanism was of the greatest fascination both to Disraeli and Leighton. Indeed to the latter it was, for a time, of overwhelming importance and explains much about his art. The concept of an "Aryan" art seems to have come into Victorian culture mainly via the writings of Friedrich Max Müller, the Oxford philologist, and Ernest Renan. The word really meant much the same thing as "Indo-European." Except for this: the propounders of the Aryan doctrine believed that the speakers of the Indo-European languages belonged to a single race or group of races which had arisen in Northern India and which had traditionally ruled the great empires of the world. The more extreme Aryanists believed that it was the destiny of this race eventually to destroy all other human strains. Sir Charles Dilke, in his famous polemic Greater Britain, published two years before Lothair, claimed that the Anglo-Saxons were nothing more nor less than the latest and most powerful of the Aryans. "In essentials the race was always one," he wrote, adding, "the Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth." Dilke sees it "ever pushing with burning energy towards the setting sun." Among the lesser breeds which he singles out for "extirpation" are the populations of China, Chile, Peru, Japan, and the African tablelands.

Dilke was a friend and patron of the Aryan artists in Leighton's circle. But these artists were very far from depicting scenes of Anglo-Saxons extirpating Chinese or Chileans. Their subject matter was ancient Greece and Rome. The new art began in about 1867 and at first caused considerable shock. For one thing the nude, after a mid-Victorian eclipse, reappeared and with a frequency and dominance it had never before achieved in British art. These "classical" nudes, furthermore, possessed a monumentality that had been found in earlier British art only in the field of portraiture. In gestural language and body rhetoric the new Aryan personages could reflect a variety of sources ranging from the Elgin Marbles to Pre-Raphaelitism. Most of the paintings were genre scenes; but, as I am suggesting, it was genre of a stately sort. And the air of pride and sensuous power in these figures is often mixed with a curious sleepiness, or at least languor, that has few precedents in British painting. Meanwhile the backgrounds often consist of fresh, cold, Poussinesque skies and mountains. The rich colors of foreground fabric and foliage play against the sugary marble of temples, palaces, and pools. The most prominent of the artists were Albert Moore, E. J. Poynter, Alma-Tadema, Bume-Jones and Watts in special and limited ways, and of course Leighton. The Continental parallels were Gérôme, Cabanel (the genre was known in France as Néogrec), and Böcklin.

What is the connection between this sort of painting and Dilke's Anglo-Saxon extirpators? Lothair tells us. Disraeli's novel is a Bildungsroman in which the young English nobleman Lothair is tempted by, and then ultimately rejects, various false religions and ideologies. One of these is preached by a painter called Gaston Phoebus (whose name, Mr. Bogdanor ought to have told us, is taken from a famous fifteenth-century Gascon knight). Mr. Phoebus is the Apollo of English Aryanism. He is, we are told, brilliant, brave, boastful, vain, arrogant, eccentric, "accomplished in all the graceful pursuits of man." He is also tall, lithe, athletic, "aquiline," and possessed of a countenance remarkable for its radiance. So fiery is his eye, indeed, and so lustrous are his complexion and his chestnut curls, that onlookers are positively dazzled. But Mr. Phoebus is no mere mannequin. He is "nursed in the philosophy of our times," and his face is weighted with deep and haughty thought.

Mr. Phoebus's theory of art requires not the study of Nature and of Man, but rather that of beautiful Nature and beautiful Man only. Nature and Art must be studied exclusively as they are found in countries inhabited by first-rate races "and where the laws, the manners, the customs, are calculated to maintain the health and beauty of a first-rate race." These conditions existed in Periclean Athens, in Hadrian's Rome, and in Renaissance Italy. Otherwise, Aryanism's archenemy in thought, law, art, and race has fully or partially prevailed. This enemy is Semitism. Semitism, which includes Christianity, especially the Protestant kind, destroys art and teaches man to despise his body.

Lothair, hearing Mr. Phoebus expound all this, regrets that he has for so long been ignorant of it." 'Do not regret it,' said Mr. Phoebus, 'What you call ignorance is your strength. By ignorance you mean a want of knowledge of books. Books are fatal.' " And he goes on to deplore the invention of the printing press, which has interfered with the truer, nobler instruction obtained via the hand, voice, ear, and eye of a living teacher. " 'The essence of education,' continued Mr. Phoebus, 'is the education of the body.' " Physical exercise, knowledge of no more than one language, no books: these principles, which have been happily practiced for generations by the British landed gentry, are the best and highest that there are. They are those of classical Greece. If Britain continues to apply them, and at the same time administers them eugenically, prohibiting armaments to all lesser races, she will extricate herself from the morass of Semitism in which she still lies. Inspired by painted and sculptured specimens of Aryan physical perfection—"Phidian types"—a new Aryan era, comparable to those of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, will come about in Britain.

Looking forward to this achievement, Mr. Phoebus and his circle bring elements from the more important Aryan epochs into their lives. Madame Phoebus, for instance, is a Cantacuzene—a descendant of the Byzantine Emperors. To Mr. Phoebus she thereby represents Aryanism's Greek patrimony. But she adds details from other parts of the tradition:

Madame Phoebus and her sister Euphrosyne welcomed Lothair in maritime costumes which were absolutely bewitching; wondrous jackets with loops of pearls, girdles defended by dirks with handles of turquoises, and tilted hats that, while they screened their long eyelashes from the sun, crowned the longer braids of their never-ending hair.

This picture is quintessentially Victorian-Aryan: Greek ladies welcoming a Saxon nobleman, the ladies in costumes that sound part Byzantine mosaic, part Paolo Veronese, part James Tissot.

They are all on board Mr. Phoebus's yacht, the Pan, en route to the painter's private Aegean island where he maintains "an Aryan clime, an Aryan landscape, and an Aryan race. It will," adds Lothair's host, "do you good after your Semitic hallucinations." (This refers to Lothair's recent abortive reception into the Roman Catholic Church.) Mr. Phoebus's enchanted isle possesses an academy of fine arts, gymnasia, and schools of music and dance. These are the only forms of education. The religion of the upper classes is classical paganism; only the poor are literate, apparently, or Christian. But even they, and even their priests, are unconscious pagans. Here, Semitic culture is a melting mask. Christ and his saints fade out as, behind them, Diana and Venus, Jupiter and Mercury—not to mention Narcissus—shine through.

But suddenly the plot of Lothair takes a surprising turn. Mr. Phoebus is seduced from Aryanism. He is asked to become court painter to the Czar, and President of the Russian Academy. He accepts. Worse, he is to begin this new career with a series of scenes executed in Semitism's very epicenter: Jerusalem. Thus does an Aryan Leighton suddenly turn into a super-Semite, a veritable Holman Hunt. As the novelist remarks:

Considering that the great objects in life with Mr. Phoebus were to live in an Aryan country, amid an Aryan race, and produce works which should revive for the benefit of human nature Aryan creeds, a proposition to pass some of the prime years of his life among the mongolian race, and at the same time devote his pencil to the celebration of Semitic subjects, was startling.

But if Mr. Phoebus thus ingloriously goes off the rails Frederick Leighton did not. In the years following the appearance of Disraeli's novel, Leighton's Aryanism only rang out the more loudly. Actually, his paintings had been pronouncedly panathenaic for years; but in 1879, nine years after Disraeli's delicately derisive portrayal, he began giving his Royal Academy Addresses, which were published as a book in 1893. These are the most definitive Victorian expression of the Aryan philosophy of art that I have come across. Leighton does not go to Mr. Phoebus's extremes. He never advises his listeners—students at the RA Schools—to leave off reading books, to be content with one language only, to advocate eugenics, or to deny arms to lesser races. He does not even advise his listeners to take up body culture, though he often praises athletics. But Leighton certainly does celebrate, if not advocate, paganism as a religion; he does trace the principles of Aryan art through history, separating on this basis the "first-rate" from the lesser races; and he does advocate a recurring Phidian racial type as the model for his students' pictures. Leighton also makes much of the fact that Semitism has always been inimical to good art. Thus he teaches what we might call artistic eugenics—the creation of an ideal, purpose-bred population. In artistic eugenics that population lives in the world of paintings rather than in the real world.

Indeed Leighton in some respects is more extreme than Mr. Phoebus. He sees Aryanism and Semitism as two great contraposed principles, the one of intellect and beauty, the other of conscience and will. These two principles have guided not just the history of art but that of civilization. In this, of course, he is echoing the Matthew Arnold of Culture and Anarchy (1869), whose oppositions between Hellenism and Hebraism amount to much the same thing.

Leighton's theories may have had Arnold as one immediate inspiration, and they also grew out of Möller and Renan, as I have said; but that is only their anthropological side. On the artistic side they link up with the associationism of Archibald Alison, Hazlitt, and Ruskin. Like Ruskin's, Leighton's theory was at its core narcissistic. An individual stands before Nature as before a looking glass, and translates what he sees into images of himself. This vision provokes a powerful reaction, and art begins when that observer utters or moves his body in response to his recognition of himself in the looking glass of Nature. The response is elaborated by what Leighton calls "the anthropomorphic impulse," which is the continual humanizing and personalizing of the world, the making of it into a perfected reflection of the self. This happens through the ever more far-reaching identification of Nature with the self.

The same thing happens before a transcription of Nature, that is, a work of art. Even in a landscape painting we ultimately see ourselves: mountains and clouds are personifications, anthropomorphic shapes and fragments, heroic encounters between personages who can ultimately all be reduced to self-images. Leighton uses the word "metaphor" to describe this reductive faculty. This sort of virtuoso self-seeing is the most primitive as well as the most central form of aesthesis. Man's earliest artistic act, says Leighton, was to freeze a self-image, for the oldest works of art are the "exact images" and "doubles" that the ancient Egyptians made of themselves. These visible egos, or eidoloi as Leighton calls them, survive death. In this way they are more powerful and more permanent than their makers. They are also more beautiful, and the rest of the history of art is simply an elaboration of this original self-portraiture. The historiography of art, in turn, chronicles man's increasing ability to discern himself in whatever images he sees—his increasing powers of anthropomorphic or even automorphic metaphor. Indeed one gets the impression, though this is never actually claimed, that in Leighton's system this is pretty much all there is not only to art but to the whole of seeing: when one does not see one's self, in short, one sees nothing.

The basic vision of the self is split into a multitude of sensations, connected into groups by the association of ideas. In their truest and best manifestation these groups constitute "that joyous fellowship of gods and goddesses, loving and hating, scheming and boasting, founders of dynasties on earth"—the gods of Greek popular religion. Phidias's sculpture records the appearance and actions of these divinities, and we sense their power still in his art; indeed it is not too much to say that Greek religion is derived from Greek art rather than the other way round; in this view pagan art prefigures and brings about religion.

In short, once one has penetrated the gaudy clouds of Leighton's rhetoric one arrives at the following bizarre proposition: the highest artistic experience is to contemplate the self in Nature, or in a transcription of Nature, as that self is sensed through Greek divinities portrayed by Phidias. In this manner the human sensibility can reach out, says Leighton in a Paterian passage, into the furthest realms of experience. The associated divinity-sensations

come fraught with dim complex memories of all the ever-shifting spectacle of inanimate Creation, and of the more deeply-stirring phenomena of Life; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and the darkness of the outer world; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and the darkness of the changeful and transitory lives of men. Nay, so closely overlaid is the simple aesthetic sensation with elements of ethic or intellectual emotion by these constant and manifold accretions of associated ideas, that it is difficult to conceive of it independently of this precious outgrowth.

Because the Greek gods have best embodied these sensations they are the first and best of all races. They are a sort of ur-Aryan race. And, among humans, Athens in the Age of Pericles most directly imitated the actions and forms of these gods, producing the purest form of Aryanism among humans. It is only at this point in history, at the Periclean point, that the "sluggish stream" of earlier civilizations gives way to the "upleaping of a living source, reflecting and scattering abroad the light of a new and more joyous day; a spring at which men shall drink to the end of all days and not be sated." The only modern parallel to this ancient, purest Aryanism is "sometimes found in the women of another Aryan race—your own." With this sudden apostrophe to the listeners before him Leighton bestows on Victorian womanhood the marks of its Aryan heritage. One assumes that here, if anywhere, is the starting-point for any new racial radiance, or upleaping living source, in Britain.

The theory of Aryanism continues. In the period between the decline of Pericles and the rise of Victoria the cultures of man were still deeply tinged with Semitism. Leighton chronicles the ups and downs of these lesser breeds and their lesser arts. Before Greece, the Egyptian eidoloi though beautiful in their Aryan properties were Semitic in their "peculiarity and inertness." They expressed the Semitized Egyptian race's "narrow but tenacious spirit." The Chaldeans and Assyrians were even more Semitic and hence had worse art. The Jews of course were the most Semitic of all. They were utterly "void of the artistic impulse." This was partly because of the second commandment and partly because, living in the level and monotonous desert, they were without the vivid landscape features, the hills, brooks, and trees that the Greeks transformed into anthropomorphic beings—"the joyous fellowship of gods and goddesses." Polytheism is the archfriend, as monotheism is the archenemy, of Beauty. Leighton quotes Renan to the effect that, in Palestine, the very desert itself is monotheistic.

Another Semitic race, more hybrid than the Jews, did succeed in creating an art. But it was the bad art of a bad people: "the obese and unattractive male personages who take their ease and toy with their prodigious necklaces, and not less the lolling ladies who He lazily curled in their last slumber on the sepulchral urns… by no means belie in their suggestiveness the character bestowed on their prototypes by Greeks and Romans alike—the character of gluttons and of sluggards." So much for the Etruscans.

If the Etruscans were less than purely Semitic the Christians have been almost more than that. For Leighton, Christianity is not merely a branch of Semitism, it is Semitism's most potent form. Christianity teaches that the enjoyment of beauty is the enjoyment of a mirage and a snare. Christianity is indeed a reversal of paganism; the gods of the Greeks became Christianity's devils. Pan kept his historicity along with his horns and hooves, and turned into Satan. Similarly were standards of bodily beauty turned upside down. The era of the Man of Sorrows ushered in the worship of "gaunt ungainliness" in art, says Leighton. Early Italian painting, for example, though expressive in line, is ignorant of Nature, empty and inaccurate in drawing. (The thought comes amiss from an artist whose reputation had been made with a picture entitled Cimabue 's Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence.) Only with the revival of humanism, and with the restudy of Nature, of the human physique, and of classical art, was Aryanism again to triumph. The Italian Renaissance was thus a recrudescence of essentially Greek racial qualities, a "strange mixture of Attic subtlety and exquisiteness of taste, with a sombre fervour and a rude Pelasgic strength." But this brief revival was swept away (and here Leighton sounds more than ever like Arnold) by the Semitic wing of the Renaissance—the Reformation.

Leighton's theory of art, as published, is thus by no means antithetical to Disraeli's earlier parodistic version of it, a version which would have been based on Leighton's conversations rather than on his lectures. The only thing lacking in the Addresses is something comparable to Mr. Phoebus's program for artistic eugenics. Leighton did not discuss the art of his own time. But one can take his pictures and those of his "classical" contemporaries as contributions to such a program. Today, for example, we often criticize these Late Victorian artists because their figures, while pretending to be Greek or Roman, are so obviously Victorian and Anglo-Saxon. It seems absurd, as William Gaunt has said, to rebaptize these Daisys and Mary Annes as so many Euphrosynes and Psyches. Modern critics go on to say that the Victorian artists have "failed" for, setting out to imitate Greek art, they have been unconsciously betrayed by the visual flavor of their own time. They have in fact doubly failed, for they ought never to have tried to paint Greek and Roman scenes at all. They should instead have been Realists or Impressionists.

If we abandon these critical assumptions—and they really have no justification—and if instead we turn to Leighton's Addresses as the proper text for Leighton's art, then we find that his Victorian goddesses and nymphs are in all probability intentionally Victorian. His purpose was to conflate the Daisys and Mary Annes of Victorian England with their "Phidian" prototypes, just as Madame Phoebus was part Greek, part Venetian, and part British. It was with this "bewitching" combination of Byzantine pearls, Renaissance daggers, and Victorian hats that Mr. Phoebus's wife and sister-in-law were able to carry Lothair off to their enchanted island.

I noted that Leighton's Aryanism seemed to expand rather than contract after Lothair, and that in places the Addresses seem almost to have been inspired by Disraeli's novel. There is another occasion on which Leighton seems to have been influenced by Lothair. In that book, at the end of Chapter 35, Disraeli describes one of Mr. Phoebus's paintings, Hero and Leander. It was in his studio covered by a curtain. A group of visitors entered and

when the curtain was withdrawn, they beheld a figure of life-like size, exhibiting in undisguised completeness the perfection of the female form, and yet the painter had so skilfully availed himself of the shadowy and mystic hour and of some gauzelike drapery, which veiled without concealing his design, that the chastest eye might gaze on his heroine with impunity. The splendour of her upstretched arms held high the beacon light, which threw a glare upon the sublime anxiety of her countenance, while all the tumult of the Hellespont, the waves, the scudding sky, the opposite shore revealed by a blood red flash, were touched by the hand of a master who had never failed.

Many years later, in 1887, while he was delivering his addresses on Aryan art, Leighton painted such a picture. It is now in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Manchester, and is very much what Disraeli describes except that the curtain is an actual part of the scene, and Hero holds this rather than a lantern. Leighton has also—and here he may more pointedly be making fun of, while drawing inspiration from, Disraeli's description—supplied a glaring lack in Disraeli's imagined picture. For, though Mr. Phoebus's painting was entitled Hero and Leander, there is no mention of the latter. And in Leighton's painting Leander occupies a predella under the main scene, like an afterthought or footnote.

Do such things constitute some sort of self-parody? A similar joke shows up in Leighton's famous 1880 self-portrait in the Uffizi, painted for that gallery's collection of self-portraits of the members of various European academies. Leighton, who was at the time President of his academy, portrays himself in his brilliant scarlet Oxford University gown. Reynolds had done the same for himself in his own day; but Leighton is not really coming on as successor to the Royal Academy's first and greatest president. Rather, behind his head is a detail from the Parthenon frieze, a part of the Panathenaic procession: Aryanism's apogee. Posing before these "Phidian types," with his curly hair, burnished beard, and brilliant eyes, Leighton assimilates, if ever such assimilation took place, a classical divinity to a modern face. He is Jupiter Olympus. It is an extraordinary exercise in comic arrogance. It illuminates that side of Leighton and his philosophy that appealed to Disraeli's affectionate wit. As a "Phidian" self seen in Nature, Leighton's picture shows the genial, even the playful, aspect that Aryanism could have before the Germans, inspired by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and other late Victorians, turned it into a deadly serious matter.