Lord Leighton and the Higher Philosophy

Gay artists and writers of the mid-to-late nineteenth-century could not identify themselves as homosexual as the term did not come into common usage until after the turn of the century. Indeed, the very notion that someone was predetermined to same sex attraction was completely outside of contemporary thought. Rather, it was believed that men could occasionally have spiritual or moral lapses.
The word homo-sexuality entered the OED only in 1892 That the terms heterosexual and heterosexuality were coined even later (1900) suggests that what is at stake in this particular naming process is a distinctly modern epistemology not only of deviance but of normalcy.1

Gay men would have had only a nagging notion of their difference, and a strong sense that this difference was wrong. It was a time when gay men by necessity lived deep within the shadows, but the shadows were vague and what they obscured was unnamed and unidentifiable. Before the clinical name homosexual became commonplace, gay Victorians were merely shamed with reference to their abominable sexual activities - pederast, sodomite, bugger as if such indulgences were merely lapses of common sense and judgement; something that any man - even a heterosexual man - might find himself committing were he to topple into a moral abyss. The new terminology homosexual - would eventually shift the meaning from the act, to the character of the person and this made the identification and accompanying vilification of gay men much more personalised and thorough because they now embodied their sexuality.
Although a blandly descriptive, rigorously clinical term like homosexuality would appear to be unobjectionable as a taxonomic device, it carries with it a heavy complement of ideological baggage and has proved a significant obstacle to understanding the distinctive features of sexual life in non-Western and pre-modern cultures.2

Given the uncategorised, amorphous nature of homosexuality during this period, it is perhaps natural that gay artists were drawn towards a time in history that named their sexual predilections and which even tolerated, if not institutionalised them; ancient Greece. By looking back, gay artists could forge ahead; they could write or make imagery about gay subjects without fear of censure and they could legitimise homoerotic and paederastic (and even paedophilic) imagery under the guise of conforming to Classical and Ancient Greek models.
Poetry was not just an invocation of homosexual desire, but also an attempt to define and classify, to order that desire[It] became a vision of love, a vision of a world where love between men and youths was somehow raised up from its furtive, criminal, despicable status as the crimen tantum horribile non inter Christianos nominandum, to a finer, higher plain, to a Higher Philosophy, as Plato had termed love between men and youths in the
1 David Halpern, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, Routledge, London & NY, 1990, p.6 2 Ibid p.18

Symposium. When Oscar inscribed a copy of his collection of essays, Intentions, for Lord Alfred Douglas, he wrote Bosie, from his friend the author In memory of the Higher Philosophy.3

Museums became a natural congregating areas for gay men; the Greek statue rooms at the British Museum were one place where Victorian, and later, Edwardian men could legitimately go and look at the naked male form without fear of arrest.4
The Uranian Ideal

Within Victorian arts and literature, one manifestation of this interest in Ancient Greece and its institutionalised paederasty was Uranianism, which became a voguish philosophical and aesthetic movement. Much lauded by eminent Victorian gay artists and writers, including, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Gerard Manley Hopkins and most notably Oscar Wilde, all of whom adopted its tenets, it took its inspiration from certain classical and ancient Greek sources. Often closely linked to the Aesthetic movement, it stood as a general coded reference for homosexuality; but what the movement actually stood for, in concrete terms, was conveniently vague, depending upon the needs of the practitioner. This mutability of intention is evident in the most famous public explanation of its ideals, which came from Wilde at his first trial in 1895. Asked to explain the code phrase The Love that dare not speak its name', which had appeared in two incriminating letters, he plaintively stated,
The Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the Love that dare not speak its name, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.5

Under the circumstances, his disingenuous response to questions about his relations with youths is understandable. Wilde sought to explain away his interest in young men as anodyne; cerebral and cultural rather than carnal. In his effort to explain his homosexuality in a time when there was no defining explanation possible, Wilde desperately enlists not only the Ancient Greek justification put forward by Plato, but biblical characters and he also refers to Michelangelo and Shakespeare who, he must have surmised, by their sheer unarguable genius
Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, , Century, London, 2003, p.88. It is apposite that one of the closing scenes of E M Forsters novel Maurice is set in the British Museum. Maurices lover threatens to reveal their criminal homosexual relationship to a passing acquaintance. 5 Quoted in McKenna p. 391
4

could surely be counted on to validate male/male desire. His strategy did not pay off, however. The Love may not have dared to speak its name, but it is probably more accurate to say that it could not speak its name there was simply no name for it.6
Leightons Arcadia

In an age where human beings wore more clothing than at any other time in history, the fully naked male was non-existent in contemporary Victorian painting and sculpture. If a painting took as its subject a biblical or mythological story, it was permissible to show some naked male flesh, albeit sans body hair, but covering the penis the focus of mans physical and sexual animality with however brief a loincloth or a scrap of gauze was essential. The painting, Hit! (fig. 1), painted around 1893 by Frederick Lord Leighton, is an example.

Fig. 1. Frederick Leighton, Hit !, c. 1893.

The word Homosexualitt appears for the first time in a letter from the German-Hungarian Kroly Mria Kertbeny (born Karl Maria Benkert; 182482) to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs dated 6 May 1868, and then in two pamphlets published in 1869 in Leipzig arguing for reform of Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code penalising sexual relations between men. Kertbenys noun for the male homosexual was Homosexualisten. He invented the word as a neutral and non prejudicial term to argue that it was a natural occurrence, and should be a matter of private behaviour, beyond the reaches of law. His aim was the protection of a minority group.

Leightons sexuality has never been positively identified; a brilliant technician and academic painter, there are many images of voluptuous women within his body of work. However, it is the homoerotic nature of many of his works that I wish to focus on. Ostensibly, the subject of Hit is that of father teaching his young son how to hunt with a bow and arrow, but the subtext is homoerotic and presents the Uranian ideal in a variety of references. Conveniently, the action takes place in warmer climes than Victorian London and this facilitates the half-nakedness of the beautiful young man and the almost total nakedness of the beautiful boy. The immaturity of the boy allows Leighton to depict him almost completely naked; paradoxically, as with similar dress codes in earlier paintings of the crucifixion, the invisibility of the childs genitals serves to highlight them, particularly as a long, dangling strand of material stands in place of his penis. The leopard skin that the man wears around his waist indicates his sexual maturity so, immediately, the unequal status of the two figures is powerfully conveyed. The fathers hands enclose the boys, controlling the action and the firing of the arrow; the boy, therefore, becomes a cipher for the fathers actions. The painting has an underlying theme of initiation into the rites of manhood and it contains a strong subliminal idea of sexual penetration (i.e. the fired arrow which, so the title of the painting tells us, has successfully found its target) and the passing down of this sexual act from older to younger. The success of the image is that the idea is conveyed equally, whether taken as heterosexual or a homosexual motif; the man could as well be initiating the boy into either; he has shown the boy how to successfully shoot his arrow. There is an erotic intimacy in the mans face pressed into the boys neck, and the placement of the boys naked buttocks between the mans open thighs reinforces this.

Fig. 2. Frederick Leighton, Study for Hit!, c. 1893.

If we refer to two preparatory drawings made by Leighton prior to painting Hit! we can see an even greater homoerotic potential presented itself. In the first (fig. 2), we see two rough sketches of the man and boy. In both pairings, the boy appears more curvaceous and femininely coquettish; indeed, in the right hand sketch, the exaggerated, slightly distorted buttocks of the boy better indicate that he is firmly sitting on the older mans lap a detail not used in the final painting. In the squared-up sketch (fig. 3), which Leighton eventually used for Hit!, the boy has an almost rapturous expression on his face, at the firing of his arrow. As we can see, Leighton toned this down considerably in the painted version.

Fig. 3. Frederick Leighton, Study for Hit!, c. 1893.

In Leightons earlier painting, the Greek mythological Daedalus and Icarus (c1869) (fig. 4), we again see the Uranian ideal of an older male instructing a younger. We come to this image at the moment that Daedalus is warning his son Icarus of the dangers of flying too high; a warning that the young man will ignore, to his peril. If we bypass the familial relationship, the subtext is also homoerotic. The elder (unbeautiful) man, whos life experience is evident by his sunburnt

outdoors skin, appeals to the beautiful depilated youth, who Leighton has rendered epicene by idealisation. The youth possesses a beauty of classical perfection, made almost fully visible by a fortuitous gust of wind that has whipped away his prophetically shroud-like wrap. This same wind will soon carry him up towards the sun, which will melt his wings which, so the story tells us, are constructed of beeswax-and-feathers. But Leighton has been unconcerned with the logistics of such manufactured aerodynamics and aside from fixing a useful handhold on each wing, he has given them a perfect, seamless appearance. This elevates Icarus to the status of angel; indeed, Leighton seems to be saying that a youth so preternaturally beautiful must surely be an angel. Apparently, and impossibly, Daedalus is tying the wings onto Icarus back by a single strand of vermillion gauze, which also usefully obscures (and thereby draws attention to) the youths genitals which are surely as minute and infantile as any cherubs. As in Hit!, the end of this flowing material serves as a phantom penis; this halferection, complete with a stylised, rounded end, juts from the crotch of the beautiful youth; the slight curve of the material around his thigh intensifies this effect. Diagonally at counterpoint to this, the youths raised right arm serves as a subliminal erection, rising tellingly above the head of the supplicant older man,

Fig. 4. Frederick Leighton, Daedalus and Icarus, c1869.

who appears to be whispering ineffectually into the hairless armpit of his inamorato. When the painting was unveiled, more than a few Uranian hearts must have fluttered at the poignant hopelessness of the pictorial relationship, in which Leightons beautiful doomed youth sans merci, holds all the cards.
Uranian love gloried in the thrill of the chase. Once captured, once had, to use Oscars phrase, the glorious chase, the moment of capture, of sexual surrender, could never be replicated. The Uranian lovers erotic doom was an endless cycle, an unrelenting grailquest of desire and satiation which could never end in lasting peace and fulfilment.7

How comforting it must have been for these same men, cognisant of the secret codes and messages contained in these and other works of art, to feel a validation of their sexuality in a time where their sexuality had no name; they were not alone, there were others like themselves within this secret club. As long as the secret remained such, they and their ilk could walk the Elysian Fields, at least in their imaginations.

McKenna p.89