Arthur Symons, Laurence Binyon, and Paterian Aestheticism: Dancers and Dragons

Abstract

The aesthetic criticism of Oxford-based essayist Walter Pater (1839-1894) was interpreted in a variety of ways in fin-de-siècle and Edwardian Britain. Perhaps most famously, Pater’s example was used to justify the sensualist interpretation of Aestheticism in the work of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). By contrast, the more subdued influence of Pater’s writings could also be felt in the Addresses delivered by the painter and sculptor Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) in his eminently respectable capacity as President of the Royal Academy, to which he was appointed in 1878. By the 1910s, the latent modernism of Pater’s essay ‘The School of Giorgione’ had been seized on by Ezra Pound in the first issue of the abrasive avant-garde journal Blast. Yet there was also an intermediary Edwardian context for the literary reception of Pater’s work that was neither Wildean nor iconoclastic – occupying instead the conceptual space in between these more extreme interpretations – and this will be the focus of the current article. The critic and poet Arthur Symons (1865-1945) and the art writer, poet, and British Museum curator Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) are the two key figures in this regard, occupying the same milieu and yet elaborating subtly contrasting understandings of Pater’s ideas.