TY - JOUR
AU - Womack, Peter
AB - Abstract Through both their arguments and their form, Oscar Wilde's quasi-Socratic dialogues, The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist, articulate a conscious anti-work ethic, an ideology of leisure. The historical roots of this discourse extend through the nineteenth century in complicated ways, connecting with the institutional history of Oxford, the poetics of dialogue form itself, the cultural implications of Victorian homosexuality, and the contradictions of British capitalism in its imperial moment. These fastidiously playful texts therefore enable us to explore the importance of being idle, amateurish and unproductive. Anecdotal evidence suggests that we are now in the middle of a reactionary revival of the ‘work ethic’, if that widely misused phrase means the doctrine that working hard is a generally virtuous thing to do, irrespective of the effect of completing a particular task. I have a school report in which a humane and kindly teacher, commenting on my 9-year-old daughter's ‘personal and social development’, uses the word ‘work’ nine times in twenty lines. I have just read an academic reference that praises the ‘work ethic’ of a candidate for a professorship in English literature. The writing of this essay is itself prompted, in part, by a performance management system that combines an urgent demand for the production of a set number of scholarly articles with an almost complete indifference to their content. The present UK government's social security policy is increasingly informed by the principle that nobody should be contentedly unemployed – an unrealistic aspiration in a low-wage economy in recession, and one that is clearly shaped by a moralistic attitude to work. Everywhere you look, a spiritual descendant of Max Weber's worldly ascetics is enjoining you to ensure your salvation by labouring in your calling. Under these grim conditions, I have been rereading Oscar Wilde with a pointed sort of pleasure, and in particular his two pseudo-Socratic dialogues, The Decay of Lying (1889) and The Critic As Artist (1890). In their form, their arguments, and their contemporary intertextual relations, they elaborate a complex anti-work ethic, a many-sided exploration of the virtues of idleness, aimlessness, and self-indulgence. Their situation is of course not ours: at most, they are connected to us by an analogy, a cultural rhyme. They do not prove anything. But they do at least show that the discourse of meritorious work has not been inescapable. There are other ways to talk. I If we treat Wilde's passing maxims as elements of an ethical system, idleness is one of its canons. Here it is as comedy: ALGERNON. Well, what shall we do? JACK. Nothing! ALGERNON. It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.1 And here is the theory that underlies the one-liner: GILBERT. I said to you some time ago that it was far more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. Let me say to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. … ERNEST. We exist, then, to do nothing? GILBERT. It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. (p. 137) In its context, on the West End stage, the line from The Importance of Being Earnest can sound like a mechanical ‘Oscarism’: you take two commonplace assumptions (that work and inactivity are opposites, and that work is justified by its object), you turn them neatly upside down, and the audience laughs.2 But the argument from The Critic As Artist suggests that Algernon's conclusion is more substantial than that. For Gilbert, activity is what compromises the integrity of the mind by subordinating it to an external purpose; as he says a few moments later: ‘Thought is degraded by its constant association with practice’ (p. 141). It is only by refraining from practice – in other words, by doing nothing – that one enters the ‘unlimited and absolute’ sphere of contemplation. This sphere is greater and more demanding than that of action, so inhabiting it can be described as hard work. But it is work that has value only if it is free from the reductiveness of practical application. Thus Algernon's line – ‘I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind’ – is not simply the flipping over of a conventional sentiment; it is also the expression of a consistent philosophical position. Like several of Wilde's positions, it is more familiar than its impudent phrasing makes it seem. That the mind is greater than its objects is a recognisable Romantic trope, and when Gilbert says that ‘action is limited and relative’, he is echoing one of its classic statements: Action is transitory – a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle – this way or that – Tis done … Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.3 Certainly Wilde has taken the thought away from its source in Wordsworth's tragedy and adapted it to its new, lighter context, but he has not travestied it. The word ‘suffering’ does not just mean being in pain, it also means being acted upon rather than acting; this is the sense that is drawn out by Wordsworth's antithesis, and also the sense that can intelligibly be glossed as ‘doing nothing’. There is a sublime of inactivity, dimly suggested by the evocation of ‘loneliness and dreams’. The thought is also touched by a Romantic figure closer to Wilde's own time and place: J. H. Newman. In his classic definition of a liberal education, ‘Knowledge Its Own End’, Newman argues from the etymology of the word (‘liberal’ as opposed to ‘servile’) that it excludes whatever serves a purpose outside itself: that alone is liberal knowledge which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation. The most ordinary pursuits have this specific character, if they are self-sufficient and complete; the highest lose it, when they minister to something beyond them.4 He goes on to say, by way of illustration, that although writing a treatise on the prevention of fractures is a more valuable activity than playing in a cricket match, the playing has a ‘liberal’ character which the writing has not, precisely because the writing serves a purpose outside itself, whereas the playing is ‘self-sufficient and complete’. And since the context of this definition is the assumption that liberal knowledge, so understood, is the proper scope of a university, it is fair to read it as not only definition but recommendation. Insofar as Newman is addressing putative university students, then, he is urging them to work hard on the basis that the work has no definite object of any kind. Algernon turns out to have surprisingly august authority for his frivolous declaration. Because of this praise of learning for learning's sake, Newman has sometimes been adopted as a standard-bearer for liberal humanist higher education against philistine or utilitarian attack.5 Students of his larger oeuvre tend to dismiss the adoption as facile, pointing out his profound opposition to every secular ideology, including liberalism.6 And certainly his praise observes severe limits. Educationally, he says in conclusion, liberal knowledge is the making of a gentleman, ideally characterised by ‘a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life’ (p. 144); and he admits, or rather insists, that all these excellences might perfectly well attach ‘to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless – pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows when decked out in them’ (p. 145). But this is not to say that liberal knowledge is merely a plausible sham. Rather, in the carefully timed and weighted progress of the argument, it is to say that liberal knowledge is good for what it is, and to warn against expecting it to be more. A cultivated intellect is no guarantee of sanctity, or even of ordinary conscientiousness. But neither is, say, a cultivated garden; and the garden may still be perfect, and beautiful, in which case it will have been worth cultivating, not as a means to some good end, but for its own sake. The argument entails a sort of parcellisation of the good: ‘Things animate, inanimate, visible, invisible, all are good in their kind, and have a best of themselves, which is an object of pursuit.’ (p. 145) It divides the field of human activity into separate realms which are in the strict sense autonomous, each ordered by its own nature. Arguably, this move is a strategic necessity: Newman is trying to establish the ‘idea’ of a Catholic university in Dublin, and needs to negotiate with religious supporters whose impulse is to subordinate knowledge to the requirements of dogma. He agrees entirely with them that the Church is paramount, but within that assumption he is seeking to mark out a space where merely human kinds of knowledge – philosophical, aesthetic, scientific – can develop to their proper extent. It is to square this circle that the idea of things ‘good in their kind’ is needed. Thus Newman becomes an advocate of learning for learning's sake, not despite his overarching doctrinal commitment, but because of it. With implications he would perhaps not have chosen, he disposes of the question ‘What good is it?’ by answering, ‘It pursues its own good’. Wilde's teasing praise of the idle and the useless, then – of doing nothing, and of doing things that have no purpose – connects him to a serious tradition that is both Romantic and religious. The historical medium of this tradition is Oxford University. Newman studied and taught there for almost three decades, breaking with it only on his conversion to Rome in 1845; his ‘idea of a university’ in the early 1850s is in many ways an Irish Catholic translation of an idealised Oxford.7 Wilde, born in Dublin in the year Newman's project admitted its first students, was at Oxford between 1874 and 1878, and much later, writing from prison, he speaks of ‘the “Oxford temper” in intellectual matters’, by which he means the capacity to ‘play gracefully with ideas’, as opposed to the ‘ violence of opinion merely’.8 The gracefulness is that of Newman's gentleman, and the playing implies a suspension, a special freedom of movement that comes from the fact that the moves do not quite count. Oxford after all is a place of preparation for the world, not the world itself. Within the spatial and temporal enclosures represented by the colleges and the university terms, thought is withheld from practice. So the ‘Oxford temper’ is the effect of a kind of bracketing: the boundaries of the university function like inverted commas round the things that are said within them, licensing them to pursue ‘a best of themselves’. This character of suspendedness is not a general Oxford mystique (though of course it is adorned by literary mystifications from ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ to Zuleika Dobson9); rather, it is a function of a transitional phase in the modernisation of an ancient institution. Early nineteenth-century Oxford had essentially been an ecclesiastical corporation: access was restricted by tests of Anglican orthodoxy, and most of the professors, fellows, and heads of college were in holy orders. Newman's own powerful phase of activism within Oxford – the Tractarian movement of the 1830s – was among other things an attempt to revitalise this religious establishment, to reform Oxford, not by breaking its connection to the Church, but by intensifying it. As it ran out of energy – not least because of Newman's own departure in 1845 – its place was taken by various other pressures, both internal and external, which tended to draw the university out of its ecclesiastical past and connect it with modern scholarship and the modern state.10 Two government commissions, in 1852 and again in 1877, responded to these cross-currents with complicated compromises between academic, religious, and institutional priorities.11 This created a temporary situation in which clerical forms of privilege were progressively detached from their doctrinal content, creating an academic community that was in effect a half-secularised clerisy. The outcome appears in some historical perspectives as an idyllic age of the don: a college fellowship at this time could offer the security of an ecclesiastical living without its dogmatic restrictions.12 The arrangement did not necessarily mean that fellows were idle – many were conscientious and active – but it was not a contract of employment. Rather, it was the secular equivalent of a clerical benefice: a modest awarded private income designed to protect the incumbent from the need to labour, and so to support a life devoted to higher things. This hybrid Oxford, religious yet uncommitted, scholarly yet leisured, was the one Wilde attended. Gilbert's assertion that ‘It is to do nothing that the elect exist’ has a literal, institutional truth. One great exemplar of this life, from Wilde's point of view, was Walter Pater, fellow of Brasenose from 1864 until his death in 1894. Famously, Wilde called Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) ‘the holy writ of beauty’, reverberantly equating the agnostic Pater's aesthetic vocation with a religious one.13 Both entail a conscious unworldliness, an abstention from the world's instrumentalities and the world's work. As Denis Donoghue puts it, The aesthetic life had to be conducted as if it were maintained in endless leisure, as it was in Pater's Long Vacations. Leisure was time spent in the perusal of images. Pater sought them mainly in England, France, and Italy, and valued them chiefly for their appearing not to minister to any public interest: medieval churches, old paintings, houses in comely decay.14 If the elect do nothing, it is not out of laziness, but so as not to debase beauty by use: it is for the sake of that integrity that a secular monasticism underwrites their vocation to ‘sit at ease and watch’. From a utilitarian point of view, this can look like a kind of self-serving inertia, as if the ‘don’ is merely hoping to enjoy his sinecure for as long as possible before the inevitable rational reforms arrive. But strikingly, the reformers speak this language too. Mark Pattison was opposed to the introduction of university examinations, on the grounds that they would prevent the students from learning ‘real truths’, replacing them with mere counters to be hoarded up and exchanged for prizes.15 And Newman himself, in one extraordinary, sinuous, and uncomfortable sentence, imagines being asked to choose between one university that consisted only of lectures and compulsory study, and another that consisted only of residence and tutorial contact. On moral grounds, he says, he would have to choose the former, because work must be a good and idleness an evil. But if it is a question of enlarging the mind and producing excellent public men, then ‘I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that university which did nothing over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun’.16 Wilde, we could say, is developing the curriculum of this imaginary university which does nothing. II Donoghue's reference to the Long Vacation is not casual. The summer break between academic years, a suspension within a suspension, is a recurrent symbol for the intellectual idealisation of leisure. Clough's first long poem, ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich’ (1848), is subtitled ‘A Long Vacation Pastoral’: it transports a group of Oxford undergraduates to a reading party in the Scottish Highlands so that, relaxed and secluded, they can elaborate their ideological differences in serio-comic freedom.17 In the same year, Newman picked up the trope in his novel of religious conversion, Loss and Gain. In the central section (Part II, chapters 1–9) his young hero spends the summer in an Oxfordshire village among wooded hills where he has outdoor discussions with fellow-students representing various doctrinal positions; the devotional focus of the story gives this particular vacation the character of a retreat.18 The pastoral is not only a holiday but also, at the same time, a conversation; the discursive form that corresponds to the idea of leisure is dialogue. In 1865 (the year when Pater's vacation took him to Florence and Ravenna and so laid the personal foundations for Studies in the History of the Renaissance), the undergraduate Gerard Manley Hopkins composed a ‘Platonic Dialogue’ on aesthetics, which begins, formulaically: It was the beginning of the Long Vacation, and Oxford was nearly empty. The professor of the newly founded chair of Aesthetics … came one day in the evening to New College gardens and found John Clutterbuck a scholar walking there.19 An extended conversation about beauty ensues, assisted by the double leisureliness (the vacation and the evening), and by the secluded beauty of the garden itself. The easy scene-setting gesture is echoed a decade later by another Balliol student: Towards the close of last July, when the London season was fast dying of the dust, Otho Laurence had invited what the Morning Post called ‘a select circle of friends’ to spend a quiet Sunday with him at his cool villa by the sea.20 This is the opening sentence of W. H. Mallock's The New Republic (1877), an intellectual satire in which various Oxford characters, including Pater, are brought together in paper-thin disguises for a country-house weekend of cultural-political conversation. Once again, the first move is to set up markers of time and place that locate the discussion in a holiday setting, where ‘playing gracefully with ideas’ appears to come naturally, like village cricket. The ‘cool villa’ turns out to be plutocratically well appointed, and the day culminates in dinner in a marble pavilion, decorated with lanterns and climbing roses and open to the warm summer night. The Oxford temper finds its dramatic embodiment in the image of a delightful picnic. The canonical source of the idyll, as Hopkins and Mallock acknowledge in their respective titles, is Plato. In 1853 The Republic joined Aristotle's Ethics as a set text, thanks to Benjamin Jowett, another of Mallock's characters and also Plato's best-known Victorian translator.21 Jowett went on to become the Master of Balliol and the single most influential teacher in Victorian Oxford. His conscious Platonising of the classical curriculum had a pedagogical as well as a canonical aspect: together with other reformers, he developed the Oxford tutorial system, centred on one-to-one conversations and ‘catechetical lectures’. One of his allies in this, Mark Pattison – who, like the Tutor in Clough's poem, took chosen undergraduates on rural reading parties in vacations – told the 1852 Commission that the tutorial system was ‘the nearest approach we make to the Socratic principle of education’.22 In a nineteenth-century Oxford context, then, a literary dialogue such as Hopkins's is a sort of re-idealisation, returning the actual educational practice to its literary origin. And Plato provides not only the model of teaching, but also some of the decor. The sociable table of the Symposium, and the flowering plane tree that shelters the speakers in the Phaedrus, offer beguiling images of cultivated ease (both consciously recalled in The New Republic), and these were heightened further by a general and nostalgic Hellenism: the Long Vacation connoted, in several senses, Mediterranean skies.23 This romanticisation is mediated by the whimsical archaism of W. S. Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans (1853) are acknowledged in passing in The Critic As Artist (p. 147). Thus Wilde's own dialogues are the formal embodiment both of an Oxford tradition and of an ambitious valorisation of leisure. Each conversation, teasingly but idiomatically, takes place in a beautiful suspension. Cyril, the secondary interlocutor in The Decay of Lying, begins by urging his friend Vivian to come outside: It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite, There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature. (p. 48) Vivian declines even this minimal activity, and they stay in the library, admiring the afternoon through the open windows, and talking about the superiority of what is invented to all that merely exists. Only when the conversation ends do they go out for a walk. The Critic As Artist, more unconventionally, is urban and nocturnal: its leading speaker, Gilbert, wants to go out into the moonlit night but is persuaded to stay, to have dinner and theorise, until finally it is dawn: How cool the morning air is! A faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple. It is too late to sleep. Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the roses. (p. 163) In both cases, then, the dialogue is placed as a pleasant way of passing the time until it is time for another pleasant way of passing the time. Shielded by this careful insouciance from any conceivable function, it is a liberal pursuit in Newman's sense, seeking only its own good. It therefore preserves its character of ‘doing nothing’ despite the energy of the discourse itself. The interlocutors are capable of talking all night; their not working is not personal laziness but a mark of the genre, not negatively a lack of action but positively a holiday. Dialogue is the Long Vacation in literary form. That this is a generic logic, and not just a Wildean provocation, is confirmed by a precisely contemporary exploitation of the form by Violet Paget, who published in a bewildering range of academic and literary genres as Vernon Lee. Her two collections of dialogues – Baldwin (1886) and Althea (1894) – are very different from Wilde's, being both more pertinaciously in earnest and more fictionally ambitious.24 Even so, they conform to the template I have sketched. Almost always, they are idylls of leisured conversation: the interlocutors are being rowed back into Venice after an excursion in the lagoon, or they are seated on the terrace of a villa overlooking the sea near La Spezia, or they are out for a walk on the hills around Haworth, marvelling at the visual effects of the smoke rising from the industrial town in the valley below them. As those examples suggest, the settings are a class identification as well as a picturesque decoration: Lee's casts have a scattering of titled characters, and at times their discussions turn, precisely, towards the question of what justifies their freedom to sit around philosophising while others are ‘building our houses, weaving our clothes, sweeping our floors, cooking our dinners, and grooming our beasts’.25 In short, this is the gracefully open-ended discourse of people who speak without urgency or animus because they can afford to be on holiday indefinitely. It is not exactly the Long Vacation, but the life of an expatriate connoisseur in Italy, rendered modestly luxurious by the nineteenth-century strength of sterling, is closely analogous. Despite the seriousness of Lee's topics – belief and doubt, social inequality, the limits of friendship – it is essential to the treatment of them that the tone remains leisurely, playful, even whimsical. These charming friends may agitate their question for hours, but they don't have to, they are amusing themselves and us. From a rhetorical point of view, the paradoxical combination of indolence and voluble speech is natural to Socratic dialogue because it is not really (as it sometimes appears to be) a kind of fiction, but rather a kind of essay. In order to be wholly at the disposal of the essay – to express their given arguments with clarity, and to take frankly the force of the arguments that are put to them – the invented Cyrils and Baldwins of the genre must be disinterested. That means, on the one hand, that they are unprejudiced: that they consider each proposition on its merits and are ideally susceptible to logical demonstration. This is formal dialectic, after all, not a casual exchange of views. But on the other hand it also means literally that they have no interests – no axe to grind, no extrinsic motive for the positions they adopt, no practical end in view. The characters of dialogue are necessarily less than substantial. As Vernon Lee puts it, their function is to ‘stand (being undisturbed by vital process) as gentle and spirited as a saddler's wooden horse, that horse which forever paws without moving, for the better display of intellectual harness and trappings’.26 And the fictional formula for this ideological tabula rasa is leisure. These people can, as it were, be entrusted with the author's thoughts because they have nothing else to do. Their enviable freedom from the ordinary conditions of life is the guarantee of their unconditional availability for conversation; devoid of material engagements, they are transparent to the topic which is their real raison d'être. This gives dialogue – ‘that wonderful literary form’, as Wilde makes Gilbert call it (p. 146) – an idyllic character which inheres not only in the settings and the weather, but also in the values of the conversation itself. Utterly without haste or anxiety, the denizens of the long summer evening defer courteously to one another, agree artificial procedures, improvise hypotheses in exquisitely structured paragraphs, allow themselves to be tempted into colourful digressions – altogether the form appears not simply as a vehicle for the articulation of a set of ideas, but also as a utopia of civilised intercourse. It makes idleness not only attractive but morally authoritative, because it makes it the condition of a social space where differences are articulated without the ‘violence of opinion’. III Wilde's dialogues are quasi-Socratic in another and more obvious sense. J. A. Symonds wrote in 1889 (the same year as The Decay of Lying) that the Phaedrus and the Symposium were ‘the true liber amoris’ by whose light he had understood his own love of men: reading them at the age of 17 was ‘the revelation I had been waiting for, the consecration of a long-cherished idealism’.27 In The New Republic, Mr Rose, a caricature of Pater so broad as to verge on the scurrilous, delivers a rhapsody on history as a sort of gallery of exquisite groups – Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Edward II and Piers Gaveston, ‘“or, above all, those two by the agnus castus and the plane-tree where Ilyssus flowed,” – Mr. Rose's voice gradually subsided, – “and where the Attic grasshoppers chirped in shrill summer choir”’ (p. 154). Wilde similarly honours the same sources. Like the Phaedrus, his dialogues take place between two men, one older, more eloquent, and more intellectually daring, the other younger, by no means stupid, but relatively naive and conventional. The progressive vindication of the older man's views, then, is like a discreet pederastic seduction: little by little the boy is persuaded to let go of his commonplace assumptions and admit the force of his friend's outrageous arguments. This innuendo is not simply an effect of literary pastiche. According to Wilde, The Decay of Lying was conceived over dinner with Robert Ross, his intimate friend and probably his first male lover: the imaginary tête-à-tête is the outcome of an actual one, though not a literal representation of it.28 The dialogues are products of a distinctively homosexual culture. It was a culture, as Linda Dowling has shown, with more than an anecdotal connection to the social and pedagogical structures of Wilde's Oxford.29 Although, as we saw earlier, the reforms of the 1850s loosened ecclesiastical control of the university, the rule that prevented college fellows from marrying was not finally removed until 1884. During the transitional period, Oxford was no longer an Anglican seminary, but it still retained an exclusively male system of relationships, including of course the tutorial relationship, designedly a setting for philosophical conversation between an older and a younger man. Thus an inherited environment of pious homosocial intensity was reproduced in secularised, or more specifically Hellenised, form. Occasionally this seems to have brought individuals close to sexual scandal: Symonds was effectively driven out of a Magdalen fellowship in 1862, and Pater was almost compromised by a promiscuous undergraduate in 1874.30 But the question of who went to bed with whom was, and is, rendered almost unanswerable by gentlemanly euphemism on the one hand and malicious gossip on the other. No doubt many of the currents of erotic feeling were really, as they were officially, chaste. It scarcely matters in any case, because what we are concerned with here is ‘Greek love’ not as a physical activity, but as what Symonds calls it: an idealism. What generates the idealism, crudely but it seems to me crucially, is that love between men is understood, in this cultural context, not to lead to anything. If it is indeed purely philosophical and sentimental, then it leads to nothing in the sense that it is unconsummated; if on the other hand it is consummated, then that leads to nothing in the different sense that it is sex without procreation. Moreover, the intimacy is futureless in itself: insofar as the sentiment is pederastic it is locked on to an intense imagery of youthfulness, a beauty which cannot mature but only fade; and even if a settled relationship were to develop, there is no socially recognised form that it could take, so in that sense, too, it is going nowhere. In several overlapping ways, then, homosexual love has the pathos of something that cannot find a home upon earth; it is ‘idealistic’ in the sense that it is non-material, unworldly, perfectly unproductive. The dialogues derive much of their paradoxical energy from the defence of this negative space: ERNEST. Stop a moment. It seems to me that in everything that you have said there is something radically immoral. GILBERT. All art is immoral. ERNEST. All art? GILBERT. Yes. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organisation of life that we call society. Society, which is the beginning and basis of all morals, exists simply for the concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, of each of its citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour to the common weal, and toil and travail that the day's work may be done. Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming up shamelessly to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas ‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another. They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk. Perhaps that is why they are so excessively tedious. (pp. 136–7) Here society – the ‘practical organisation of life’ – is healthy, honest, and productive; with the implication that its opponent, the dreamer and lover of beauty, is correspondingly sickly, untrustworthy, and sterile. The name of this ironically constructed sphere is ‘art’, but the word as it is used here denotes not so much a practice or a class of objects as a mode of being: a mode which strikes ‘society’ as unforgivable and hateful. The antagonism half-seriously sketched by this set of terms has a sexual politics just below its surface, not in the sense that ‘art’ is a mere code word for homosexuality, but in that art and homosexuality are being valorised together as a repudiation of the useful, a delight in beautiful emotions that serve no purpose beyond themselves and are therefore categorised as ‘immorality’. Initially, Gilbert recognises the demands of society as legitimate, but within a few lines that fair-mindedness gives way to rebellion against ‘the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal’. Despite his good manners it is clear that these honest, beaming folk, with their assumption that one must always be doing, are the enemy. In the same year as The Critic as Artist, a closely similar structure was articulated by Henry James in The Tragic Muse.31 It is a novel about the vocation of the artist, and James works his theme out in the classic terms of Victorian fiction, that is, as a pattern of marriage choices. Nick Dormer is destined by his family for a political career which would be underwritten by a splendid marriage to Julia Dallow, but with the other side of himself he wants to become a painter, which would mean renouncing (and hurting) Julia. Julia's brother Peter Sherringham is a young diplomat with a passion for the theatre; he patronises a rising actress, and falls in love with her, but when she becomes a star he is forced to choose between her and his diplomatic career. Amid these interlocking dilemmas there appears Gabriel Nash, whose name appropriately suggests a cross between an archangel and a dandy, and who could roughly be described as an aesthete; at least, some of his many opinions sound like Wilde's. He is never explicitly presented as gay, but he has no dilemmas and no attachments; he is sexually distinguished, not by his desire for anyone, but by his outsideness to the heterosexual syntax of the plot. If marriage is, within the novel's image of life, the defining question, the point at which characters resolve their social identities, then Nash remains unresolved. He floats in and out of other people's lives as he pleases, engaging enthusiastically with them so long as he finds their predicaments stimulating, and gracefully disappearing as soon as he begins to get bored. He lives for art, but he is not himself a painter or an actor or anything else: with art as with relationships, he takes an intelligent interest in other people's, but does nothing himself. What he does do, as the whole of my argument so far should lead us to expect, is talk. In other words, Gabriel is a native inhabitant of the dialogue-world who has strayed into a novel. His alien origin is marked by his celibacy, by the slightly uncanny air that surrounds him, and by the fact that many of the normal characters, especially the women, find him extremely annoying. The formal dissonance that this anomaly highlights is simple: it is that while a dialogue may look superficially like a play, or a conversational chapter from a novel, it is radically different because it does not have a plot. A ‘scene’, in realist drama or fiction, serves the action; it advances it or retards it, it elicits new and pertinent aspects of character, it deepens our understanding of what is at stake in the morally decisive choice, and so on. In a dialogue, as we have seen, it is typically given from the outset that nothing is happening: the space for conversation opens up, precisely, in a break from action, and the theoretical freedom and fluidity are made possible by the fact that in practice there is nothing at stake. The scene, if it can still be called that, is not doing any work – hence its pleasantly dilettantish atmosphere. What Nash's truancy reveals, then, is that dialogue is a homosexual genre, not only through its Socratic associations, but also through its negative relations with realist fiction.32 The dominant narrative form of the time, in the novel and in drama, is constructed out of the problematics of marriage: the moving parts of its machinery are courtship, adultery, misalliance, estrangement, stepchildren, inheritance. It is heterosexual not just in its depicted relationships, but also in its formal dynamics, its way of making the connection between subjectivity and society that constitutes character. Wilde's imagined conversationalists, who deride realistic art explicitly, also negate it formally by withholding themselves from this heterosexual order. They don't make decisions, don't produce anything, don't marry, don't have children, don't define themselves. Like Nash, and like ‘the critic as artist’, they don't do things at all. They contemplate them, and talk about them, and one of the most powerful images of that suspension of activity is their sterile and idealising love. IV At exactly this historical moment there is a recurrent story about fathers and sons. It is told for example in Symonds's autobiography, written in 1889. His father was a distinguished and formidable doctor, and the narrative idealises his moral authority and intelligence but also makes it clear that it was only when he died, in 1872, that Symonds's own literary potential was released from years of inhibition. The two opposed characters have an ambivalent typicality. Prevented by his frail constitution from doing what his father calls ‘solid work’, and prevented by his conflicted sexuality from succeeding either to his father's ethical clarity or to his paternal role, the son is invalid coming after doctor, dilettante after specialist, words after deeds.33 To the young idler, the undeviating industry of the older generation appears at once exemplary and oppressive. The pattern is matched in Father and Son (1907), the famous memoir by Symonds's friend Edmund Gosse, and also marks the relationship between Gosse's contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson and his paternal line of heroic civil engineers. Fathers are people who did things properly. By contrast, Gosse's career as a literary critic involved deploying charm and good taste against accusations of slipshod scholarship;34 and Symonds thinks his own intellectual signature has been a certain carelessness about details, a want of thoroughness, combined with a vivid sense of things as they affected me. My literary work has been a prolonged causerie, deficient in scientific research but abundant in suggestiveness.35 This formulation returns us to The Importance of Being Earnest, which opens with Algernon's comment on his own piano-playing: I don't play accurately – anyone can play accurately – but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life. (p. 421) The watchful antitheses, apologetic but defiant, are dialogic in a Bakhtinian sense: filled with the disapproving tones of the implicit paternal interlocutor. Technical inaccuracy is less an incidental failing than a generational badge: the sons' inability to match their fathers' conscientiousness is recuperated as a mark of their spontaneity, their Pateresque openness to experience. Not the treatise but the causerie, the chat; not the working professional but the impulsive amateur. In 1894, as the consumptive Stevenson was struggling with his own ‘father and son’ narrative in the unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston,36 Kipling pinned down the relationship with reductive brilliance in ‘The “Mary Gloster”’, a dramatic monologue addressed by a dying self-made businessman, founder of a fleet of cargo ships, to his ineffectual university-educated son. ‘Mary Gloster’ refers both to the speaker's dead wife and to a ship named after her. The son is married too, but to a woman the father despises for being thin, fashionable and, above all, childless: I've seen your carriages blocking the half o' the Cromwell Road, But never the doctor's brougham to help the missus unload.37 The comic metaphor maps the domestic on to the commercial: both Mary Glosters realise their value in the cargo they deliver. Thus the father is aligned with steel and coal and the reproduction of both people and capital, the son with unearned income and beautiful sterile emotions. The poem's insistence on the daughter-in-law's lack of femininity almost amounts to a bowdlerised suggestion that the son is gay – the old man recalls his college rooms as looking ‘more like a whore's than a man's’ – but once again, the point is not so much the coded identification as the associative cluster. Heterosexuality, solidity, robust health, and productive investment combine to produce their converse: homosexuality, decoration, ailments, and consumer spending. The way Kipling tells the story invites us to think of the economic category as the decisive one. Wilde's own tragedy was, after all, about money at least as much as it was about sex. Sometime in 1891 he was caught up in yet another rehearsal of the father and son story, with the Marquess of Queensberry and Lord Alfred Douglas in the antithetic roles. This was a toxic version: the father obsessively controlling, the son coldly luxurious, both violently angry. It was at almost the same moment, in 1892, that Wilde discovered his ability to write West End hits; and from then until 1895 he earned far more than at any other point in his literary career, with several plays, at times, running simultaneously in London and New York.38 He was therefore able to subsidise Douglas when his father stopped his allowance, and also to entertain with conspicuous extravagance; the lurid tale that eventually unfolded in court was set in the Café Royal and the Savoy Hotel. And then his downfall was correspondingly financial: when he lost the libel case he became liable for Queensberry's costs, while at the same time frightened theatre managements closed the plays and so cut off his income. The contents of his house were forcibly sold a few weeks after his arrest, and he was officially bankrupt by the end of the year.39 As a public spectacle, then, Wilde represented not only sexual depravity but also that fundamental Victorian image of moral failure, the prodigal who cannot pay his debts. The two forms of disgrace were connected: counsel at the trials detailed the presents Wilde had lavished upon various lower-class boys, with the implication that his financial imprudence was sexually incriminating. In its economic dimension, then, the father and son story is a demonisation of expenditure. The father invests, building up resources for the future by forethought and self-denial; the son consumes, dissipating the accumulation in immediate fulfilment. The figure of the flamboyant homosexual dramatises consumption in several ways at once. As an ‘aesthete’ he is associated with luxurious tastes in clothes, furnishings, objets d'art. And in the grossest sense he is one who ‘spends’ unprofitably – his seed is wasted instead of engendering offspring. More than that, though, his neglect of issue suggests that he does not aspire to a father's relationship with property; begetting no heirs, he has no motive for conserving his wealth or looking to its long-term increase. He is improvident like a child, because the principal upper-class inducement to financial prudence, the care of the dynastic future, means nothing to him. He is thus the very type of free consciousness, unconstrainedly open to ideas and sensations: the man, as we saw earlier, who does things for their own sake. But equally, and with heavier social and cultural authority, he is the type of a scandalous irresponsibility, a pure consumer untouched by any unselfish consideration, a prodigal son.40 Wildean dialogue gives this suspect icon a voice, so that it ceases to be merely an object of (vilifying or romanticising) representation, and becomes a speaking subject. The clever young conversationalists of the dialogues and plays are there to perform prodigality, to articulate its distinctive values. In The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist, gratuitous expense is modelled by the fictional situation (a capricious pause before a further amusement); by the central propositions (beautiful untruths are more valuable than useful information; appreciating a work of art is a more creative pursuit than producing it); and by the playful, inefficient mode of argument (‘Ah! don't say that you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong’ (p. 157)). At every level, the text refuses to get down to business, and that very consistency has the effect of universalising the refusal, focusing its ostensible skittishness, making it into a fully significant gesture. The prodigal acquires an ideology. In a more severely sociological frame of reference than Wilde's, it could be called the ideology of unearned income. Here for example is J. A. Hobson, the liberal critic of imperialism, writing a few years later, in 1910: The Home Counties … are full of well-to-do and leisured families whose incomes, dissociated from any present exertion of their recipients, are derived from industries conducted in the North, or in some overseas country. A very large share, probably the major part of the income, spent by these well-to-do residential classes in the South, is drawn from investments of this nature. The expenditure of these incomes calls into existence and maintains large classes of professional men, producers and purveyors of luxuries, tradesmen, servants and retainers who are more or less conscious of their dependence on the good will and patronage of people ‘living on their means’. This class of ‘ostentatious leisure’ and ‘conspicuous waste’ is subordinated in the North to earnest industry; in the South it directs a large proportion of the occupations, sets the social tone, imposes valuations and opinions.41 What is new here, according both to Hobson and to the modern historians who quote the passage, is the disconnection between the lives of these leisured investors and the material processes that generate their income. In a way, this is a straightforward result of the global reach of British capitalism by the end of the nineteenth century. Domestic agriculture was in steep relative decline, so the traditional ruling class was progressively separated from the practice and government of rural life. At the same time, the industrial capitalism of Scotland and the north of England was losing its early Victorian hegemony, to be replaced, in macro-economic terms, by a financial services industry centred on London. Britain was no longer so much the workshop of the world as its ‘banker, moneylender, insurer, shipper and wholesaler’, its relations with primary production increasingly indirect.42 This was all the more possible because much of the investment was itself in improved communications: the railway, the steamship and the telegraph made possible a newly global commercial system. Indicatively, George Bernard Shaw's first play, staged in 1892, is a satire in which the young hero and heroine come to terms with the discovery that they are living comfortably on the rents of slum housing.43 Their initial ignorance about their own income is historically representative: the chain of financial mediations now has so many links that it passes out of sight. Hobson argues that this new, or newly dominant, rentier group does indeed form enough of a class to be said to possess an ideology: that is, it ‘sets the social tone, imposes valuations and opinions’, and communicates its values to other groups that are dependent on its spending power. He does not spell out what he takes these values to be, but he does offer some suggestive allusions. For example, he schematically sets southern ‘ostentatious leisure’ against northern ‘earnest industry’. From our point of view the terms of this opposition are reverberant. On the one hand, leisure and ostentation both appear on the bill of complaint against our paradigmatic prodigal sons, and on the other, earnestness is a paternal Victorian keynote, teasingly identified as such in Wilde's famous title. The father and son story in these years starts to look mythic: there is a fault line in the national family. Industry, in this context, is both an economic category (mines and mills, as opposed to the pleasant environments in which their profits are spent) and a human quality (working hard as opposed to ‘living on one's means’). It is ‘earnest’ in the sense that it is in earnest: for Hobson, industrial production is the real thing, and the economy of the Home Counties is derivative – less solid, closer to illusion, or to mendacity. Insofar as that opposition holds, we would expect the ideology of ‘ostentatious leisure’ to vindicate also the secondary, the insubstantial, the lie. Hence the timeliness of Wilde's dialogues. One of Hobson's own theoretical reference points is declared by the phrases he puts in inverted commas – ‘ostentatious leisure’, ‘conspicuous waste’. They are from Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, which appeared noisily in the USA in 1899. Veblen's angular prose comes at times surprisingly close to Wilde's. Exemption from labour, he argues, is honourable because it is a mark of belonging to a superior order; however, if it is to signify in that way, it must of course be socially visible. It is not enough not to work; you have to be seen not to work – in other words, you have to exhibit the habits, tastes, and accomplishments that connote a life of freedom from toil. If your family's exemption goes back a few generations, then you may have acquired all these signs as it were naturally. But if you are in more of a hurry than that, then not having to work is something you have to work at: all the suggestions of a cumulative life of leisure, and all the proficiency in decorum that comes by way of passive habituation, may be further improved upon by taking thought and assiduously acquiring the marks of honourable leisure, and then carrying the exhibition of these adventitious marks of exemption from employment out in a strenuous and systematic discipline. Plainly, this is a point at which a diligent application of effort and expenditure may materially further the attainment of a decent proficiency in the leisure-class proprieties.44 It follows that in order to function as an unambiguous mark of leisure, a given activity must be free from the slightest suspicion of utility. The pursuits of the leisure class are useless, not because its individual members are feckless or ineffectual, but because their behaviour is governed by a regime of conspicuous gratuitousness. With this, we are back in the world of the dialogues. Thought should not be debased by association with practice. Hard work is permissible only if there is no definite object of any kind. The Algernons, Gilberts, and Cyrils of Wilde's cunningly inconsequential conversation pieces are performing exactly Veblen's negation, ‘carrying the exhibition of [their] adventitious marks of exemption from employment out in a strenuous and systematic discipline’. They are, so to speak, the organic intellectuals of the leisure class. This is an equivocal role, though, perpetually ironic in its voicing, whether the irony takes the form of Veblen's sarcasm or Wilde's demure camp. When the two heroines of The Importance of Being Earnest are beginning to quarrel there is this exchange: CECILY: This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. GWENDOLEN: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different. (p. 460) Gwendolen's retort is almost a caricatured gentility – the over-refinement of an outdated aristocracy, as it appears for example in Victorian bourgeois dramatists like Gilbert or Pinero. But the conscious extravagance of her declaration is in excess of that social placing: it seems not so much snobbish as surreal, so that what is parodied is not Gwendolen's hauteur but Cecily's naive realism. In other words, the dramatic invention sides with the speaker's outrageous artificiality.45 Social exclusiveness is not so much being subjected to criticism as carried to utopian extremes: the mores of the English upper class are stylised to the point where Jermyn Street becomes an outpost of the avant-garde. But in that case, Gilbert and Vivian and the rest, including Gwendolen, are the leisure class ideologists that the leisure class would rather not have. They embrace its freedoms – ease, high consumption, personal whim – in a way that insulates them from moralistic reservations, and makes them into samples of an emancipated future. They are the heralds of a state in which, as in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, scarcity will have ended, and with it the morality of scarcity – self-denial, altruism, and conscientious work.46 Like Weber, whose sociology of the ‘work ethic’ appeared only a little later, in 1905, they treat the maxims of capitalist progress (labour in your vocation, pay your dues promptly, refuse present enjoyment for the sake of future gain) as the totems of a tribe whose time is past.47 In them, consequently, the ethics that correspond to the actual economic life of the Home Counties appear as comfortably respectable and, at the same time, flagrantly immoral. The effect is a kind of teasing of the moral pretensions of work – playful, but under the circumstances far from innocuous, as can be seen in the vengeance it eventually elicited. Provoked too far, the earnest fathers showed how well they understood the extra-economic meaning of leisure: Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour. 1 The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I, in Oscar Wilde, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, ed. Anthony Fothergill, Everyman Library (London 1996) p. 439. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 2 For contemporary identifications of ‘Oscarism’, see unsigned reviews of Intentions in the Pall Mall Gazette and the Athenaeum (1891), and reviews of An Ideal Husband by Clement Scott and A. B. Walkley (1895): Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London 1970) pp. 90–3 and 178–82. 3 William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ll. 1539–44. Wilde quotes these lines, evidently from memory, in Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. ii, ed. Ian Small (Oxford 2005) p. 96. 4 J. H. Newman, The Idea of a University (New York 1959) p. 134. The Idea of a University is a collection of thematically linked writings from various times and occasions; ‘Knowledge Its Own End’ is the fifth of the discourses Newman delivered in Dublin in 1852. 5 There is a crisp account of this habit in Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (Harmondsworth 2012) ch. 3: ‘The Useful and the Useless: Newman Revisited’. 6 For example, David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (Austin, Tex. 1969) pp. 76–7. 7 For a subtle account of the Oxford sources of The Idea of a University, see Sheldon Rothblatt, ‘An Oxonian “Idea” of a University: J. H. Newman and “Well-Being”’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. vi: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1 (Oxford 1997) pp. 287–305. 8 Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, p. 39. 9 Matthew Arnold, ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, was first published in 1853; Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, or, An Oxford Love Story, in 1911. 10 The transition from Tractarianism to liberal reformism is illuminatingly traced in H. S. Jones, Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge 2007). 11 See Christopher Harvie's two-part survey in G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys, The History of the University of Oxford, vols. vi and vii: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Parts 1 and 2 (Oxford 1997, 2000): ‘Reform and Expansion, 1814–1871’ (Part 1, pp. 697–730), and ‘From the Cleveland Commission to the Statutes of 1882’ (Part 2, pp. 67–96). 12 Denis Donoghue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York 1995) p. 30. 13 In Oscar Wilde, ‘Mr Pater's Last Volume’, a review in the Speaker, 22 Mar. 1890, repr. in Reviews, ed. Robert Ross (1908) pp. 538–45. 14 Donoghue, Walter Pater, p. 319. 15 Jones, Intellect and Character, pp. 153–6. 16 Newman, The Idea of a University, p. 165. 17 Arthur Hugh Clough, The Bothie, ed. Patrick Scott (St Lucia, Queensland 1976). Unlike most editions of Clough, this one uses the 1848 edition; subsequent revisions reduced the philosophical element. 18 J. H. Newman, Loss and Gain (London 1848). 19 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oxford Essays and Notes, ed. Lesley Higgins (Oxford 2006) p. 136. 20 W. H. Mallock, The New Republic, or, Culture, Faith and Philosophy in an English Country House (London 1877) p. 1. 21 W. H. Walsh, ‘The Zenith of Greats’, History of the University of Oxford, vii. 313. 22 Jones, Intellect and Character, p. 182. 23 For example in George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891), a book contemporary with The Critic As Artist, the literary good life is associated with holidays in Greece and discussions of classical prosody. Since the novel and its author are both remote from the culture of Oxford, the stability of mythic elements is striking: the Hellenic, the recreational, the conversational, the uneconomic. 24 Vernon Lee, Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (London 1886), and Althea: a Second Book of Dialogues on Aspirations and Duties (London 1894). 25 Althea, p. 166. 26 Ibid., pp. ix–x. 27 The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (London 1984) p. 99. 28 Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, p. 42, and note. 29 Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY 1994). 30 Symonds, Memoirs, pp. 130–3; Donoghue, Walter Pater, pp. 58–62. 31 Henry James, The Tragic Muse (London 1890). 32 The general association is obliquely confirmed by Vernon Lee's dialogues. She describes her Socrates figure, Baldwin, as a ‘not very feminine man’ who has been placed by the accidents of education in ‘a woman's standpoint’. He is explicitly Lee's alter ego within the text, and his clever, ingenuous, and somewhat boyish interlocutors, such as Althea, are visibly versions of the young women she fell in love with. See Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (Oxford 1964) p. 112. 33 Symonds, Memoirs, p. 234. 34 See the DNB entry by Gosse's biographer Ann Thwaites, who quotes Henry James in Wildean vein on Gosse's ‘genius for inaccuracy’. 35 Symonds, Memoirs, p. 227. 36 Robert Louis Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories, ed. Paul Binding (Harmondsworth 1979). The biographical sources of the novel are traced in Binding's introduction. 37 ‘The “Mary Gloster”’, in Rudyard Kipling's Verse 1885–1932 (London 1933) p. 129. 38 The detailed story is in Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford 2000). 39 The financial aspects of Wilde's downfall are set out, tendentiously but in detail, in Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, pp. 41–71, and the accompanying editorial commentary. 40 The character has a theatrical outing, crude but quite seriously argued, in St John Hankin's comedy The Return of the Prodigal (1905). 41 J. A. Hobson, quoted in P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000, 2nd edn. (London 2002) p. 182. 42 Ibid., p. 163 43 G. B. Shaw, Widowers' Houses, in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). 44 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, ed. Martha Banta, World's Classics (Oxford 2007) p. 37. 45 For example Gwendolen's sentiment in Act III – ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing’ – is also expressed as an epigram that was published, in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894), as Wilde's own. See Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, pp. 469 and 521. 46 Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1st pub. 1891), in Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, pp. 15–47. 47 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (Harmondsworth 2002). © The Author, 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Dialogue and Leisure at the Fin de Siècle
JF - The Cambridge Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bft018
DA - 2013-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/dialogue-and-leisure-at-the-fin-de-si-cle-VD5Egq0vsO
SP - 134
EP - 156
VL - 42
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -