SOURCE: “An Essay in Sexual Liberation, Victorian Style: Walter Pater's ‘Two Early French Stories’” in Literary Visions of Homosexuality, edited by Stuart Kellogg, The Haworth Press, 1983, pp. 139-50.

[In the following essay, Dellamora contends that Pater's revision of the first chapter of The Renaissanceattempts to reconcile Christianity and homoeroticism.]

The following essay challenges a common view of the career of Walter Pater: that he criticized Victorian religious beliefs and social mores in his first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), then spent the rest of his life backing down.¹ Such a retreat appears to be evident in his decision to delete the notorious Conclusion from the second edition, now retitled The Renaissance (1877).² Nevertheless, I will argue that his decision was made in order to avoid entangling himself in further arguments with his critics at Oxford, critics who had already shown an ability to damage his academic career. At the same time, he added to the opening chapter an attack on religious and moral bigotry that refers to his own difficulties at Oxford. Writers on Pater have scarcely noticed another major change in the second edition, the addition to the first chapter of passages discussing The Friendship of Amis and Amile, a thirteenth-century French romance centered on male friendship.³ Analysis of the romance and of Pater's interpretation indicates that in adding this discussion, he made both more explicit and more nuanced his view of the value of the body in human relationships and of the importance of libidinal elements in Christianity and in medieval culture. His historical analysis parallels a theoretical analysis whereby Pater argues the necessity and worth of the libidinal aspects of culture generally.⁴ The rapprochement with Christianity that a critic like David DeLaura sees in Pater's revision exists, but alongside his continuing opposition to organized religion.

I

In this section I will analyze both the original version of the first chapter of Pater's book and its revision in the second edition. This analysis, though detailed, is necessary to show both the humanist polemic with which Pater began and its extension, in the second edition, to include the claims of male love. Because he offers his analysis as historical, I have also referred to the medieval texts on which he bases his arguments. Pater sees in the texts esteem for the body. In The Friendship of Amis and Amile in particular, he sees a rapprochement between eroticism and Christianity, as well as a positive individual and cultural narcissism. My own consideration of the medieval texts further bears out Pater's interpretation.

While critics always remember the suppression of the Conclusion in the 1877 edition of The Renaissance, much less attention is paid to the other major change in the edition, the revision of the opening chapter. In the first edition the opening chapter had been entitled “Aucassin and Nicolette.” It is well known for Pater's suggestion in it that the Renaissance had already begun in the twelfth century in France.⁵ Pater associates this “great outbreak” of the human spirit both with philosophic rationalism and with aberrant sexual behavior.⁶ He instances the romance of the philosopher Abelard with his young niece Heloïse to exemplify both: “the name of Abelard, the great clerk and the great lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with the free play of human intelligence round all subjects presented to it” (SHR, p. 4). Pater associates Heloïse and Abelard both with the courtly-love poetry of Provence and with a thirteenth-century prose and verse romance, Aucassin and Nicolette, which he proceeds to discuss, emphasizing its delight in detail and expression for their own sake and its “faint air of overwrought delicacy, almost of wantonness” (SHR, p. 10). Particularly, he notes “this rebellious element, this sinister claim for liberty of heart and thought” (SHR, p. 16). He ends the chapter by quoting the hero Aucassin saying (naturally, in French) that he would rather be in hell with Nicolette than in heaven with monks (SHR, p. 17). In the course of the chapter Pater speaks of the rebirth of Venus as well as of the return of the god Amor in the guise of Aucassin (SHR, pp. 15, 14). This erotic renewal signals the “medieval Renaissance” (SHR, p. 15).

In the 1877 revision of the chapter, now called “Two Early French Stories,” Pater has added a new element, The Friendship of Amis and Amile. While he describes this work as a thirteenth-century romance, the story exists in one version as early as the late eleventh century; and the version that Pater uses is in form a saints' legend. The essence of the story is “the testing of the fidelity of two friends.”⁷ In Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, John Boswell observes that “there is no hint of sexual interest between the knights, but their love for each other explicitly takes precedence over every other commitment.”⁸ Pater regards this latter aspect as the antinomian element of the story. In retelling the tale, he emphasizes as well the specifically bodily aspect of the friendship, an aspect that suggests that Boswell may be overly cautious in not noting a “sexual interest” below the religious surface of the legend. Pater observes that in it “that free play of human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is an assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great friendship, a friendship pure and generous, pushed to a sort of passionate exaltation.”⁹ Pater quotes from the romance a long section in which the angel Raphael appears to Amis while he and Amile are sleeping alone together in Amis' sick chamber. The angel informs Amis that his “body shall be made whole” (R 1877, p. 13) only if Amile kills his own children and bathes Amis in their blood. With anguish, Amile does so; and Amis is healed. At the end of the story, after the death of the two men, the body of one miraculously moves to the church in which the body of the other is being kept. Pater uses this passage to end the revised essay. (In the romance there are other mentions of the body, too. Friends from childhood, “the two children fell to loving one another so sorely that one would not eat without the other, they lived of one victual, and lay in one bed.”¹⁰ Later, they embrace and kiss when they meet as adults. Though these contacts are not sexual, they are physical. Body is important in their friendship.)

The Friendship of Amis and Amile may be read as a text in which the figure of Christ as supreme Knight is assimilated to a cult of friendship that is almost Greek.¹¹ Both protagonists are antitypes of Christ in his double aspect of loving and sacrificial friend of whom it may be said, “Greater love than this no man has, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15: 13-14). At one point in the romance Amis lays down his life for Amile by agreeing to fight in single combat in his place; Amile in turn lays down his life by proxy by slaying his children so that Amis may be healed. Generally, the knighthood or “chivalry” of the two friends is closely associated with Christ (Morris, pp. 296, 306-07).

In the tale, Christian love, sacrifice, and male friendship are conflated. The writer also stresses the importance of chastity. Though Amis warns Amile not to yield to the daughter of the French king, he does, thereby occasioning the need for Amis to rescue him by combat with a knight who has challenged Amile before the king. Amis then tests Amile a second time by sending him to stay with Amis' own wife. Again he advises Amile not to sleep with the woman. Since the two friends are doubles, Amis' wife mistakes Amile for her husband, nor does he undeceive her. But “a night-time whenas they lay in one bed, then Amile laid his sword betwixt the two of them, and said to the woman: ‘Take heed that thou touch me in no manner wise, else diest thou straightway by this sword.’ And in likewise did he the other nights, until Amis betook him in disguise to his house to wot if Amile kept faith with him of his wife” (Morris, p. 301).¹² Only after this test does Amis fight and slay Amile's accuser. Later, after Amile's children have been first killed and then miraculously restored to life, Amile and his wife “even unto their death … held chastity” (Morris, p. 308). The emphasis on chastity carries a hint of the superiority of male friendship to heterosexual love, even to married love. As well there is a suggestion that Amis and Amile fall short of one another in at times preferring women to each other. I have already mentioned that Amile fails Amis (and Christ) by going to bed with the daughter of the French king. Earlier, Amis had set out to search for Amile; but after meeting and marrying a wife, Amis forgets his quest for a year and a half before remembering and telling his men: “We have done amiss in that we have left seeking of Amile” (Morris, p. 298). This lapse indicates uxoriousness on Amis' part, a shortcoming his wife pays for when he sends Amile to her in disguise and for which he himself pays when, after he has become a leper, his wife “had him in sore hate, and many a time strove to strangle him” (Morris, p. 303).

In the 1877 edition, Pater deploys his quotations from The Friendship of Amis and Amile on either side of his discussion of Aucassin and Nicolette. Doing so, he suggests sexual connotation in the friendship of Amis and Amile. Pater paraphrases the description in the romance of the golden-haired Aucassin's beauty. Aucassin, “the very image of the Provençal love-god” represents the “ideal intensity of passion” (R 1877, p. 25).¹³ At the center of the romance are the secrets of sexual intimacy, imaged in “the little hut of flowers which Nicolette constructs in the forest, whither she has escaped from her enemies” (R 1877, p. 21). The hut is a test of Aucassin's love:

So she gathered white lilies,
Oak-leaf, that in green wood is,
Leaves of many a branch I wis,
Therewith built a lodge of green,
Goodlier was never seen,
Swore by God who may not lie,
“If my love the lodge should spy,
He will rest awhile thereby
If he love me loyally.”

(p. 46)¹⁴

When Aucassin and Nicolette meet in the lodge, “either kissed and clipped the other, and fair joy was between them” (p. 57). It is there too that Nicolette heals Aucassin's shoulder, injured when he fell from his horse.

The attractiveness and intimacy of the two lovers add the element of sexual interest about which the story of Amis and Amile is silent. By associating the works, Pater revives not just Amor but specifically the homoerotic Amor of Greek tradition. The “antinomian” elements of Aucassin and Nicolette—Aucassin's rejection of an asexual Christian paradise, his rejection of knightly duty in preference for love (p. 20), his sexual contact with Nicolette before marriage (pp. 63, 72)—indicate nonconformity with the norms of courtly love and suggest that nonconformity underlies The Friendship of Amis and Amile as well. Pater also indicates his preference for the intensity of a tale of male friendship by the fact that he has juxtaposed it with a heterosexual romance that parodies “the love theme” of serious romance.¹⁵ At one point, for instance, Aucassin intervenes in a fight in which the only weapons are baked apples, eggs, and fresh cheeses. After he slays many men, he is begged to desist, since “it is nowise our custom to slay each other” (p. 62). Pater has chosen a parodic instance of heterosexual romance to compare with what he calls the “strength” of the tale of Amis and Amile, a strength not only of sworn friendship but also, in the version of the story that Pater is following, of feudal obligations and Christian faith.

Pater makes it clear that he is aware that the rival claims of friendship and love may be claims between two kinds of love. Seeing this conflict also in the later thirteenth-century romance of Chaucer, The Knight's Tale, Pater says: “Such comradeship, though instances of it are to be found everywhere, is still especially a classical motive, Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not whether the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of those two for each other, is the chiefer subject of the Knight's Tale” (R 1877, p. 9). His further reference to the “sweet … daily offices” of Palamon and Arcite in prison is a coded reference to sexual intimacy. In finding male love in an “antique” tale by a medieval writer, Pater connects medieval, Christian culture with the tradition of homosexual friendship in Greek culture.

II

The ideal of male love that Pater specifically introduces with reference to The Knight's Tale is androgynous in character, combining strength with sweetness.¹⁶ The masculine connotation of strength is already evident in Pater's application of the term to The Friendship of Amis and Amile. Sweetness, his term for Aucassin and Nicolette, suggests artistic playfulness, beauty, and sensuality. It also suggests femininity. Pater had borrowed the term sweetness from his Oxford contemporary Matthew Arnold; but the addition of a sexual charge is his own. DeLaura notes that Abelard was one of Arnold's heroes too; nevertheless, the “‘worship of the body’” with which Pater later inflects and infects Arnold's critical terminology is “emphatically no part of Arnold's proposed pattern of human life” (p. 243).¹⁷

In infusing the strength of The Friendship of Amis and Amile with the sweetness of Aucassin and Nicolette, Pater achieves a cultural and erotic synthesis that he identifies with the Renaissance both in its classic sixteenth-century phase and in its earlier manifestation during the Middle Ages (R 1877, pp. 16-17). The medieval Renaissance does not merely juxtapose these terms; they are dialectical, and Pater discovers sweetness within The Friendship of Amis and Amile itself.¹⁸ Besides being an act of literary interpretation, this discovery enables Pater to divine the structure of personal relations in a much earlier period. Further, the interpretation is cultural. He regards eros as crucial in an integrated culture. The love of Amis and Amile adds a necessary sweetness to the severe and patriarchal order imaged in the legend. In this way, Pater provides what one might call a model of cultural narcissism. The love of Amis and Amile figures a libidinal aspect of medieval culture without which it would be rigid, brutal, and hysterical. Finally, the synthesis of sweetness and strength in The Friendship of Amis and Amile and in the medieval Renaissance itself reaffirms a permanent tendency in human action and culture towards androgyny, a conciliation of “masculine” and “feminine” values. Accordingly, the Christ who stands above and is typified by events in the story of Amis and Amile is feminized in their mutual love.¹⁹

In referring above to “cultural narcissism,” I have in mind Freud's view of the place of narcissism in the mature self. In Freud, opposed terms ultimately include each other in dynamic relations. For instance, in the lecture “The Libido Theory and Narcissism” (1917), he describes narcissism as the libidinal element of the ego and as “the source of the Ego Ideal” though earlier he had opposed the terms ego and libido.²⁰ In other words, the “ideal ego” or “conscience” derives from libido and has as its object the restoration to the self of primal bliss.²¹ When, however, the external object of the libido and this “ego-censor” (p. 429) contradict each other, neurosis may ensue. In the lecture Freud focuses on neuroses that occur precisely when the attraction towards someone of the same sex conflicts with the demands of conscience. Writing forty years before him and with great suppleness, Pater observes the same need for conciliating the object of libido with moral choice. In “Two Early French Stories,” he considers the need not only as it affects Amis and Amile individually but as it is fulfilled in their love. In this context, moreover, he goes a step further in seeing androgyny as crucial to the development of a sound culture. Such cultures seldom occur, and Victorian England is not among them; but in his writing Pater repeatedly celebrates their advent. He sees the urge to achieve “the harmony of human interests” (R 1877, p. 29) as a primary impulse in Western culture.

III

Pater's handling of medieval materials as discussed above might be considered wholly profane in spirit, with Christ and Christianity being valued only as both become expressive of androgynous values. Further, Pater's analysis is in a line of nineteenth-century argument, both French and English, that tends to reduce religion to sexuality.²² In this section, I will discuss the rationalizing, scientific aspect of Pater's approach. In Section IV, however, I will try to explain how Pater's presentation of Christianity combines erotic and religious elements without reducing one to the other.

At the time of Pater, it was commonplace to reduce religious meaning to psychological. For instance, in Idylls of the King Tennyson “treats the quest for the Holy Grail as an example of mass hysteria. The whole thing originated, he makes perfectly clear, in the frustrated sexual desires of a young woman who had been disappointed in love and gone into a nunnery.”²³ In Madame Bovary, Flaubert portrays Madame Bovary's schoolgirl religiosity as a displacement of sentimental erotic yearnings.²⁴ In “Two Early French Stories” Pater cites Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris as exemplifying the “rebellious” tendency of medieval culture (R 1877, p. 27). In that novel the scholarly, devout, and dutiful Archdeacon Claude Frollo pursues his studies into the profane arcana of alchemy and thereafter falls into a wholly destructive passion for the virginal Esmerelda. Pater had plotted a similar trajectory in his early review of William Morris' The Defence of Guenevere (1858). Concluding a discussion of the transformation of medieval religion into the “rival religion” of courtly love, Pater observes: “That whole religion of the middle age was but a beautiful disease of [sic] disorder of the senses. … Reverie, illusion, delirium; they are the three stages of a fatal descent both in the religion and the loves of the middle age. Nowhere has the impression of this delirium been conveyed as by Victor Hugo.”²⁵ Mariolatry is reduced to the worship of the courtly lady, the idolization of Christ to the idolization of the knight. By the same logic, pious edification is transformed by the clerical author of The Friendship of Amis and Amile into homoerotic reverie. “This low descendental view” echoes in turn Pater's biography.²⁶ A devout adolescent intent on becoming a clergyman, Pater lost his faith while a student at Oxford (1858-62), probably at the same time that he became conscious of his homosexual orientation.

IV

The interpretation of culture proposed here goes beyond the rationalizing aspect of Pater's analysis at the same time that it makes the point that a revisionary view of sexual relations has implications for the understanding and transformation of culture itself. By 1877 Pater had eschewed a positivist approach that offered to explain religion as an epiphenomenon of psychology. Rather, he was now ready to attempt a rapprochement between Christianity and eros that is very much his own. When DeLaura observes a “new welcome extended to Christianity” (p. 261) in “Two Early French Stories,” he is referring to passages like the following added in 1877: in “the Renaissance … the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to, but only beyond and independent of the spiritual system then actually realised” (R 1877, p. 7). Such statements, however, are conciliatory in a highly qualified way. Pater's refusal to oppose Christianity is a refusal to engage in dogmatic disputes, which falsify his sense of “the more sincere and generous play of the forces of human mind and character, which I noted as the secret of Abelard's struggle” (R 1877, p. 28). In the sentence quoted by DeLaura, Pater asserts the independence of culture from the demands of religious orthodoxy. His most positive comment about Christianity is one in which he describes Abelard or, more generally, the humanist as “reaching out to and attaining modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of that system, though possibly contained in essential germ within it” (R 1877, p. 8). The “essential germ” of humanism may be contained within Christianity. This claim, however, grants little to orthodox belief at the same time as it concedes to humanism, with its “reason and heart and senses quick” (R 1877, p. 8), a basis of Christian authority.

Pater's comments on the Christian “system” have a context in contemporary liberal writing. For instance, at the same time as Pater was writing the essays that would later appear in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, John Stuart Mill also criticized conventional sexual norms in On the Subjection of Women (1869). And in On Liberty (1859) he too had contrasted custom, conventional Christianity, and public opinion to individual liberty and growth:

The creed remains as it were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant. To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the deepest impression upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, without being ever realised in the imagination, the feelings, or the understanding, is exemplified by the manner in which the majority of believers hold the doctrines of Christianity.²⁷

Both Mill and Pater contrast an inert dogmatic Christianity to the life of the individual.

When critics discuss Pater's move toward Christianity in 1877 and later in Marius the Epicurean (1885), they need to emphasize his understanding of Christianity as valorizing the body, including the homoerotic body. In this regard, the story of Heloïse and Abelard, with which Pater introduces the two romances, provides an instructive point of contact with Pater and suggests that in conflating eros and Christianity he spoke with an understanding of medieval Christianity. The degree to which Heloïse, who eventually became head of a religious house, internally assented to the “system” that she served so well is open to debate. Peter Dronke, however, demonstrates that the intensity of her love for Abelard, and the esteem accorded it by her contemporaries, are not in doubt. In a letter that Pater would have appreciated for its conciliation of religious and erotic feeling, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny and prince of the Church, wrote to Heloïse at Abelard's death:

My illustrious and dearest sister in God: this man to whom you cleaved, after the sexual oneness, with the stronger and finer bond of divine love, he with whom and under whom you have long served God—I tell you, God is now cherishing him in his lap, in place of you, or like a replica of you. And at the second coming, at the sound of the archangel and the trumpet heralding God descending from the heavens, God will restore him to you through his grace, having preserved him for you.²⁸

It is further worth observing that Abelard himself “explored with great sensitivity and feeling the nature of the love between … two men” in his planctus of David for Jonathan.²⁹

Pater's positive remarks about Christianity occur in a passage in which he sees contemporary opposition to Abelard in the Church as one between “the mere professional, official, hireling ministers of that system, with their ignorant worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of light, the humanist” (R 1877, pp. 7-8). This dichotomy is Pater's riposte to his critics at Oxford, including the bishop there, after publication of Studies in the History of the Renaissance. The book had also prompted an attack on Pater by a colleague and former student at his Oxford college, John Wordsworth, grandnephew of the poet. As a result, Pater missed a routine promotion that instead went to Wordsworth. The setback was a shock that would in itself adequately account for Pater's decision to withdraw the Conclusion from the second edition (1877). He had additional reason, however, in that the Conclusion had been parodied by “the horrid undergraduate” W. H. Mallock in his successful satirical novel of 1876, The New Republic (Brake, p. 50). By deleting the Conclusion and rewriting Chapter i, Pater for the moment regained control of his meaning.

He made his decision to delete that Conclusion no later than November 1876 (Letters, p. 17). That same year, he decided to stand for Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Though he was aware that he would be strongly opposed, he knew that he merited the position. Nonetheless, opposition took an unexpected turn when Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College and chief political power in Oxford at the time, blackmailed Pater by threatening to disclose some incriminating letters. According to rumor, it was Mallock who gave the letters to Jowett (Brake, p. 48). While no evidence for the specific date of Jowett's showdown with Pater has yet been discovered, it likely occurred between February 1877, when a student publication opposed Pater's candidacy, and April, when he withdrew his name (Brake, p. 48; Small, pp. 314-315).³⁰ In the meantime, Pater was also attacked in an article in the March issue of The Contemporary Review (Small, p. 315).

In the same month that saw his humiliation, the second edition of The Renaissance was being bound (Small, p. 314). In suppressing the original Conclusion, Pater had tried to avoid “well-recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies” (R 1877, p. 28); but he added a polemic against what his biographer would later refer to as “vile little opportunists” (Brake, p. 48). As well, he also now took the opportunity to celebrate male friendship, a celebration that elaborates his view of the libidinal element of culture and at the same time extends the claims for “liberty of the heart” to male love. Doing so, he was willing to reconsider Christianity so as to include homosexuality within it, a process he continued in Marius the Epicurean.

Writing the essay was an act of courage that also illuminated homoeroticism in Western culture. On these grounds, Pater was an important originator of homosexual criticism. He saw homoerotic interpretation as a means of affiliation whereby homosexuals in different times and places may confirm their experience and use it as a means of access to alien cultures. A century before John Boswell wrote of “The Triumph of Ganymede” in the literature of 1050 to 1150, Pater had already divined and written about it in “Two Early French Stories,” though he did not write about the specifically homosexual texts that Boswell adduces.³¹ It is worth keeping in mind, moreover, that Pater's homosexual polemic coincided with a general polemic in praise of the diversity of erotic and other experience. As well, he was always concerned to see eros and personal freedom in relation to cultural formation and change. This plurality of concerns in Pater recommends itself well to critics today.

Notes

1. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 7-8, 153-55. Geoffrey Tillotson, “Pater, Mr. Rose and the ‘Conclusion’ of The Renaissance,” in Criticism and the Nineteenth Century (London, 1951; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967), pp. 124-46.

2. For Pater and Oxford politics, see Laurel Brake, “Judas and the Widow: Thomas Wright and A. C. Benson as Biographers of Walter Pater: The Widow,” PSt, 4 (May 1981), 39-54. See also Walter Pater, Letters, ed. Lawrence Evans (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. xxi-xxii, but see also p. 13n; hereafter cited in text as Letters. For a debate on Pater's reasons for deleting the Conclusion, see Lawrence F. Schuetz, “The Suppressed ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance and Pater's Modern Image,” ELT, 17 (1974), 251-59; and “Pater and the Suppressed ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance: Comment and Reply,” ELT, 19 (1976), 313-21. See also Michael Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), pp. 141-44.

3. For an exception, see Richard L. Stein, “The Private Themes of Pater's Renaissance,” Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970), pp. 175-177.

4. See, for instance, Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 50-56.

5. He drew the suggestion from French writers. See Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), pp. 304-05; hereafter cited in notes as R 1893.

6. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), p. 2; hereafter cited in text as SHR.

7. MacEdward Leach, ed., Amis and Amiloun, Early English Text Society, O. S. no. 203 (1937; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), p. xx. See also Ojars Kratins, “The Middle English Amis and Amiloun: Chivalric Romance or Secular Hagiography?” PMLA, 81 (1966), 347-54; Dale Kramer, “Structural Artistry in Amis and Amiloun,” Annuale Mediaevale, 9 (1968), 103-22; Kathryn Hume, “Structure and Perspective: Romance and Hagiographic Features in the Amicus and Amelius Story,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 69 (1970), 89-107; Kathryn Hume, “Amis and Amiloun and the Aesthetics of Middle English Romance,” SP [Studies in Philology], 70 (1973), 19-41; and Diana T. Childress, “Between Romance and Legend: ‘Secular Hagiography’ in Middle English Literature,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], 57 (1978), 311-22, esp. 318-19.

8. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 240.

9. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1877), p. 9; hereafter cited in text as R 1877.

10. I quote from the translation of William Morris, The Friendship of Amis and Amile, in The Collected Works, introd. May Morris (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), XVII, 295.

11. For sexuality in Greek male friendship, see Richard J. Hoffman, “Some Cultural Aspects of Greek Male Sexuality,” Journal of Homosexuality, 5 (1980), 217-25; K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London: Duckworth, 1978), p. 170 et passim; Boswell, chs. i and ii passim; John Addington Symonds, Studies in Sexual Inversion (n.p.: privately printed, 1928), p. 19. Gervase Mathew touches on the relation of sexuality to medieval friendship though he makes no use of the gay literature that John Boswell discusses (“Ideals of Friendship,” in Patterns of Love and Courtesy, ed. John Lawlor [London: Edward Arnold, 1966], pp. 46, 49).

12. Leach, discussing Amis and Amiloun, an English version of the tale, remarks: “The motivation of the incident is the common one used throughout the story: it is as much a test of Amis' friendship for Amiloun as the judicial combat is a test of Amiloun's friendship for Amis” (pp. xlvi-xlvii).

13. The appeal of this figure to homoerotic sensibility is indicated as well in that the poem attributed to Pierre Vidal which Pater refers to at this point is one that he knew from John Addington Symonds' An Introduction to Dante (1872). Symonds, a bisexual, rhapsodizes over the image of “Chivalrous Love” (R 1893, pp. 316-17).

14. References to Aucassin and Nicolette in the text are to Andrew Lang, Aucassin and Nicolette (New York: Barse and Hopkins, n.d.).

15. D. H. Green, Irony in the Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), p. 99.

16. For a discussion of the importance of these terms in Pater's critical vocabulary, see Billie Andrew Inman, “Pater's Conception of the Renaissance: From Sources to Personal Ideal,” VN [Victorian Newsletter], 47 (Spring 1975), 22-24.

17. References to DeLaura in the text are to David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1969). For a discussion of the relation of Arnold and Pater, see pp. 165-91, 202-22, 240-44 et passim. Michelet also uses the term sweetness to characterize Abelard (R 1893, p. 308).

18. As well he might. Taking Amis and Amiloun as “the medieval English classic on … friendship,” Mathew notes that the first known Anglo-Norman version (c. 1200) “begins by promising that it will be a song of love, of loyalty, and of great sweetness (‘d’amour, de leaute, et de grand doucour’)” (p. 45). I have already mentioned the “sweet … daily offices” of Palamon and Arcite.

19. For the feminization of Christ in Pater's writing see my essay “Pater's Modernism: The Leonardo Essay,” UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], 47 (Winter 1977/78), 137, 145. I also discuss this process in my current study of Marius the Epicurean.

20. Marthe Robert, The Psychoanalytic Revolution: Sigmund Freud's Life and Achievement, trans. Kenneth Morgan (New York: Harcourt, 1966), p. 312.

21. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1971), XVI, 429.

22. R 1893, pp. 308, 317-18. Pater's reading of medieval culture shares attributes with what Herbert Sussman calls “second-generation Pre-Raphaelitism,” a phenomenon that he associates with A. C. Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, and William Morris. Sussman says that the work of these writers “deals openly with wholly non-respectable forms of sexuality, employs a style that often moves toward the evocative and symboliste, and is presented as the expression of an adversary culture.” See Herbert Sussman, “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Their Circle: The Formation of the Victorian Avant-Garde,” VN, no. 57 (Spring 1980), p. 7. In particular, Swinburne in his William Blake (1868) gave Pater the passage from Aucassin and Nicolette with which he ends the chapter in the first edition as well as the general idea of “the old Albigensian ‘Aucassin’ and all its paganism.” See Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Complete Works, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (London, 1925; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), XVI, 135, 136n. Cf. R 1893, p. 303.

23. A Dwight Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), p. 228.

24. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 48-49, 50-53. See Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater (Boston: Twayne, 1977), p. 21.

25. James Sambrook, ed., Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 107. In the passage, “of” is an obvious misprint of “or.”

26. Culler, p. 229.

27. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. David Spitz (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 40.

28. Peter Dronke, Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies (Glasgow: Univ. of Glasgow Press, 1976), p. 23.

29. Boswell, p. 238. See Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry 1000-1150 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 116.

30. Although Brake implies that the meeting occurred before Pater decided to delete the Conclusion (p. 51), for the reasons that I adduce in the preceding paragraph, I believe that Pater reached this decision on his own. It is more likely that Jowett would have intervened in 1877 when controversy about Pater was spilling over into the press. I realize, however, the limited worth of inference when a date is in question, and I look forward to more biographical information becoming available.

31. Boswell, pp. 243-266.