Victorian Teenagers Gone Wild

The girl in the top left corner
has a mischievous face.

Throughout history, teenagers have rebelled against their parents. Popular psychology maintains that youthful rebellion helps young people build their own identity, separate from their parents. It happens in every class, culture, and race, so of course it happened in the Victorian Era.

You may say: "but Victorians were so proper!"

"Myths about the Victorian family are almost as numerous as those about the American West. Many regard the institution as a model for modern life, full of dutiful children and loving parents. Others see it as an example to avoid -- rigidly patriarchal, unloving, and riddled with class and gender restrictions. Both views, though too generalized, contain some truth, partly because of the tremendous variety of family lives during Queen Victoria's reign. Good or bad, families were the most important factor in a child's success in life" - Ginger S Frost.

 Even today, we tend to attribute the tendency to rebel with trouble in the individual, sometimes linking rebellious behaviour with the early signs of a psychopathic personality. Though teen rebellion often seems selfish, fed by boredom and glib, it generally has nothing to do with those traits in the person, but more to do with what one is rebelling against.

Young middle and upper-class Victorians became social reformers, committed to mending the injustices perpetrated by their society and sometimes within their own families. Young Victorians, like Bram Stoker, became aware of the problems associated with alcoholism and other addictions. The era saw the rise of the suffragette and educational reforms to help the poor. Of course, some young women started smoking and drinking to irritate their parents and some young men dressed below their station, so they could sneak into the poorer neighbourhoods for a bit of slumming - not all rebels are altruistic. We all had that friend who made us aware of broader social problems by personifying them.

1909 woman smoking opium.

Although teen rebellion was wide-spread, two particular people come to mind, when I think of 1890s writers, who were rebellious teenagers: Edmund Gosse and Constance Wilde.

Philip Henry Gosse with his son Edmund (1857).
Frontispiece to the first edition of Father and Son.

Obviously, Gosse comes to mind because of his memoir, Father and Son (1907), which bore the subtitle: "a study of two temperaments." His father, Philip Henry Gosse was a deeply religious scientist, who rejected the theories of his contemporary, Charles Darwin. In Father and Son, Gosse focuses on his father's rejection of the theory of evolution and his own coming of age through the rejection of his father's religion.

My own state, however, was, I should think, almost unique among the children of cultivated parents. In consequence of the stern ordinance which I have described, not a single fiction was read or told to me during my infancy. The rapture of the child who delays the process of going to bed by cajoling 'a story' out of his mother or his nurse, as he sits upon her knee, well tucked up, at the corner of the nursery fire—this was unknown to me. Never in all my early childhood did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, 'Once upon a time!' I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with hummingbirds, but I had never heard of fairies—Jack the Giant- Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance; and though I understood about wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger even by name. So far as my 'dedication' was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.

As Gosse grew up to be a poet, it's safe to say that his life was formed through his parents' teachings - though not in the ways that they intended.

Constance Lloyd
(before she married Oscar Wilde).

Constance Wilde had a terrible relationship with her mother. Franny Moyle, Constance's biographer, called Constance's mother "a selfish and difficult woman." Her mother's conduct toward Constance may be characterized as abusive. It was a relationship that Constance survived through forming a rich internal life and getting away to school by taking classes at the University of London. The 1871 and 1881 censuses describe Constance as a scholar. As was the case with Gosse, Constance's rebellion was ideological, but also deeply personal.

The outfit that Constance is pictured in above was typical of young aesthetes in her day, which was viewed as both a fashion and an intellectual movement - almost the way that hippies, or people who only wear vegan clothing can be viewed as participating in both a fashion and intellectual (or moral) movement. Constance's brother mocked her dresses and the rest of her family, including an eventual step-sister, encouraged her to dress more like them. But Constance married the Prince of the Aesthetic Movement and realized her independence through marriage - a trope in young Victorian women's lives.

Gosse and Constance's stories critique the Victorian Era as a whole and represent examples of positive social changes (women's education and learning in general), but not all teenage rebellions go so well.

Teen pregnancies are often used as a symbol of teenagers gone wild, so it is worth noting here that during Queen Victoria's reign the rate of premarital pregnancies hovered around 20%, according to Eurostat. It's likely that number was much higher. Yet, there is something twisted about viewing sex as an act of rebellion.

Boys marching out of the London Foundling Hospital for the last time (1926).
For more on the London Foundling Hospital, click here.

The "fallen woman" was a blanket term that Victorians applied to any unmarried woman with sexual knowledge of any sort. This term covered rape victims, prostitutes, and unwed mothers alike; in some families, it might even be applied to a woman who read French novels.

The "new woman" represented another kind of rebellion, closer to what young Constance Wilde was up to.  This term was popularized by Henry James in the 1870s and referred to an emerging feminist ideal.

"In Victorian England, as men clung to the sanctity of the patriarchy, they were increasingly becoming more and more frightened of their own women. Bram Stoker capitalized on this fear in his iconic novel, Dracula. In 1897, a "New Woman" was emerging in Victorian society, coinciding with the women's suffrage movement throughout England. This New Woman, riddled with feminist awareness, would be the cause of fodder for Stoker's heroine, Mina Harker. Because this New Woman was aspiring to be independent of patriarchal male dominance, (or had already obtained said independence) to the old guard of Victorian society, she was viewed as perverse. The New Woman was a mutation of the woman the patriarchal society wanted her to be. The New Woman's strides towards economic and sexual changes in society as a whole should be viewed as terrifying. Stoker takes these beliefs, and applies them to his female characters in Dracula" - source.

Even Bram Stoker's wife might have been viewed in terms of the new woman for her interest in aesthetic, also called "hygienic," dress, she ran in the same circle of women as Constance and even once dated Oscar Wilde.

"New Woman — Wash Day" (1901)

Oscar Wilde's youthful romance with the future Mrs Stoker was also a kind of young rebellion because she was penniless, while he came from an upper-class family, whose fortune was waning.

There were lots of ways for young men to rebel, especially in the 1890s. Any society that oppresses one group, the way that Victorians repressed women, also represses the dominant group by making the perceived characteristics of the oppressed group taboo. Oscar Wilde rebelled by incorporating long hair and feminine characteristics into his interpretation of aestheticism.

Young people help refresh the human population, getting rid of the old ideas that aren't working anymore.

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Dr. Norman Shanks Kerr and the Barrel Fever

First identified in 1813, delirium tremens is a severe form of alcohol withdrawal, also called “the DTs,” “the horrors,” “the bottleache,” “quart mania,” “ork orks,” “gallon distemper,” “barrel fever,” or “the shakes.” Symptoms include: fever, sweating, tremors, nightmares, disorientation, confusion, hallucinations, seizures, hypertension, and it gets worse at night. Medical professionals now recognize delirium tremens as medical emergency, which if left untreated will lead to death. The only cure for delirium tremens is total and lifelong abstinence from alcohol, though valium may be prescribed to ease the patient through the withdrawal process. This cure was not so clear in the 19th century, even 88 years after its discovery.

Victorian doctors naturally focused on easing the startling symptoms of the withdrawal by prescribing hard drugs or by trying to wean the patient off of alcohol. By mid-century, a minority of doctors were, however, beginning to get the right idea. Among them, we find Dr. Norman Shanks Kerr, a teetotaler throughout his adult life, he gained so much acclaim for his work that he became known the world over. The article, which I’ve transcribed below, was published in Montreal in 1899 in his memory and in honour of his work. Although he was based in London, anyone working in temperance and medicine knew Dr. Kerr’s work.

Written as a kind of eulogy, the article below emphasizes Dr. Kerr’s triumphs and achievements, but he was fighting a difficult uphill battle all the way to achieve anything. Delerium tremens wasn’t his only cause, but it is the most serious form of alcohol withdrawal and the result of years of regular heavy drinking. It is difficult to convince hardened alcoholics suffering from delirium tremens today to give up drinking, even with the support of such organizations as Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Kerr was trying to convince them during a time when mothers could buy morphine over-the-counter for their teething babies.

Nonetheless, great strides were made, as is illustrated in the passage from Richard Eddy’s Alcohol in History (1877).

I imagine Dr. Kerr as an intelligent, but eccentric man, who lived for his work and the Northern Tribune does little to dispel that idea.

The Late Dr. Norman Kerr.
The noted temperance advocate

We give a portrait of Dr. Norman Kerr, who died at Hastings on Tuesday night, May 30 1889. Having been for some time in failing health, he removed to Hastings at the beginning of this year, but in the middle of April he paid a visit to London to preside over a meeting and caught a chill, from which he never recovered. There is hardly another instance of a medical man devoting so many years of persistent study to the subject of alcoholism, such as Dr. Kerr presented. The spread of temperance was his life-work, and he brought to the question all the knowledge which he had accumulated in many years of study. His pen was always busy, and he was a continual contributor to various medical and other journals. He also published over twenty books relating to inebriety.

Dr. Norman Kerr was born in Glasgow in 1834. He graduated in Glasgow University in 1861, and settled in London in 1874, where he became eminent as a physician. As a medical man he refused to prescribe intoxicating drinks, in which practice he for many years stood almost alone. Before going to an infectious case he always took the precaution of having a good meal, believing that this would fortify him against the disease. He was fond of relating that on one occasion he was hastily summoned to a badly infectious case, long after having taken food. He, however, managed to provide himself with a large basin of turtle soup, and, thus, fortified, escaped infection.

LECTURES ALL OVER THE COUNTRY.

As a staunch and able advocate of temperance Dr. Kerr is best known. When scarcely out of his teens he took part in the inaugural meeting of the United Kingdom Alliance at Manchester in 1853. Thenceforward he lectured on temperance and diet reform in every part of the country, but though he favoured legislative interference with the traffic, he was one of the first to realize and act upon the principle that social reform should proceed side by side with legal intervention. To this end he, in 1855, proposed and organized the Glasgow City Hall Saturday Evening Concerts, and later he became a director of the Coffee Tavern Company, which had the same objects in view.

In 1880 he was presented with a carriage, etc., in recognition of his public services, the Earl of Shaftesbury being one of the moving spirits in the presentation. Dr. Norman Kerr long advocated the treatment of inebriates in the manner lately prescribed in the Inebriates Act. He held that inebriety was a disease, not a crim, and that it should be treated accordingly. For instance, he much approved of the homes established in America, where drunkards were treated by specialists. The result of such treatment was, Dr. Kerr contended, that a third of the patients were permanently cured. His remedy in short, was absolute and unconditional abstinence from all intoxicants under all circumstances, even at the Lord’s Supper. Under the new Inebriates Act a great step forward has been taken toward giving effect to these views, but, as everybody knows, difficulty has arisen regarding the provision of homes to which ‘sufferers’ may be sent.

HUNDREDS OF TEETOTAL DOCTORS NOW.

Thirty or forty years ago a ‘temperance’ doctor was a great rarity, and all could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Today the British Medical Temperance Association numbers its members not by ones but by hundreds, and one of the leading features of the annual Medical Congress is the great temperance meeting of doctors which invariably takes place during the sittings of that assembly. Alcohol is not ordered as a medicine one twentieth part so much as it was twenty years ago.

Dr. Norman Kerr told many stories of doctors who have ordered strong drink being placed in awkward positions. One of these anecdotes told by the eminent physician is to the following effect: A man who was taken very ill sent for his doctor. ‘Ah!’ said the latter on his arrival, ‘you’re in a bad way. Nothing will put you round but brandy.’ ‘But I’m a teetotaler, doctor,’ urged the patient. ‘That does not matter. You must not risk your life for a silly fad,’ replied the doctor. ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I think I had better call another doctor, and perhaps he’ll prescribe something else.’ The medical man was cornered, and then blurted out ‘Well, it’s like this. My patients generally like the medicine I prescribed for you and it is less trouble and saves my drugs, I always advise it. But as you won’t have it, I’ll send you a bottle of medicine in half an hour that will do you more good than all the brandy in the country.’

Dr. Kerr was president of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, and chairman of the Inebriates’ Legislative Committee of the British Medical Association for the Cure of Inebriates. He was in continual correspondence with various authorities on the the question all over the world, and was honorary member of the American association formed for the curing of inebriates. In politics he was a Liberal, but not a keen partisan. He was married in 1871 (by the Hon. and Rev. F.E.C. Byng, now Lord Stafford) to Eleanor Georgina, daughter of Mr. Edward Gibson and he leaves a son and several daughters. - ‘Christian Herald.’

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Drinking Gin with the Wildes

Imagine it's 1893 and you have a room full of thirsty authors. As a good hostess, what would you serve? To this end, I'm composing here, a Victorian drink menu.

Victorian Lemonade

1 1/2 parts Beefeater Gin
2 part water
1/2 lemon
1/4 simple syrup
mint leaves

Garnish with a lemon wheel and serve to Speranza. Oscar Wilde's mother preferred gin to most other alcoholic beverages in the 1890s. That being said, Speranza may have also enjoyed Sloe Gin.

"London Dry" was the generic term for the dry gin that became popular during the era. They called dry gin "London Dry," regardless of where it was actually produced and flavouring your London Dry with sloe berries was popular among middle-class women.

Sloe Gin

1lb sloe berries
8oz caster sugar
1 3/4 pint gin

Prick the skin of the sloes all over before placing in a jar. Add the sugar and the gin, then seal and shake. Store in a cool dark cupboard and shake every other day for a week. Then shake once a week for at least two months. Strain through muslin into a bottle.

This obviously takes more than an afternoon to prepare, so I might wait until she invited me to one of her salons, then bring it as a hostess gift.

Gin also became popular among military men and men who were travelling as a way of getting your daily dose of quinine, thereby warding off malaria. For writers who travelled to India or Africa, like Oscar Wilde himself, you might serve this simple drink.

Gin & Tonic

1 wineglass of gin
2 lemon slices
3 lumps sugar
ice (or iced-water)

But I'd probably want to serve Oscar Wilde absinthe because I'm like that.

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Degeneration, Decadence & Drink

First published as Entartung (1892), Max Nordau’s major work was published in English as Degeneration in 1895. In Degeneration, Nordau transfers Bénédict Augustin Morel’s notion of degeneracy to the arts circles of his time, suggesting that authors and artists are as degenerate as criminals, prostitutes and lunatics.

Some of what we call fin-de-siècle decadence, Nordau called degeneration. This decadence was also on trial in 1895, along with anything else that had to do with Oscar Wilde. Decadence and degeneration are two of the major themes that I'm most interested in the artists and writers of the 1890s. It permeated every aspect of the aesthetic life from fashion to diet to decorating and consumption. Nordau observed this in Degeneration, which, historian, Steven E. Ascheim describes as:

...a veritable diatribe of cultural criticism that characterized virtually every modernist fin-de-siecle current as a symptom of exhaustion and inability to adjust to the realities of the modern industrial age.

I can't imagine fully tackling all of Nordau's views on the aesthetic movement in a single blog post. Nor am I interested in fleshing out the coincidental timing of the release of Nordau's work in London with regards to Wilde's trials, though I find it interesting enough to note and wish to further add that Nordau actually mentions Wilde in his work, asserting that Wilde considered himself above morality. Here, however, I intend to just lightly touch on some of Nordau's ideas, as well as what Wilde, Bram Stoker and H.G. Wells had to say, about why writers drank.

The full-text of Degeneration is available here and I'll begin with a quote from it. Nordau writes:

WE have recognised the effect of diseases in these fin-de-siecle literary and artistic tendencies and fashions, as well as in the susceptibility of the public with regard to them, and we have succeeded in maintaining that these diseases are degeneracy and hysteria. We have now to inquire how these maladies of the day have originated, and why they appear with such extraordinary frequency at the present time. Morel, the great investigator of degeneracy, traces this chiefly to poisoning. A race which is regularly addicted, even without excess, to narcotics and stimulants in any form such as fermented alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, hashish, arsenic which partakes of tainted foods (bread made with bad corn, which absorbs organic poisons (marsh fever, syphilis, tubercu-losis, goitre), begets degenerate descendants who, if they remain exposed to the same influences, rapidly descend to the lowest degrees of degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarfishness, etc. That the poisoning of civilized peoples continues and increases at a very rapid rate is widely attested by statistics.

When I read that, I can't help but feel there is something very modern about it. If we didn't feed our children gluten or non-organic dairy, if we didn't smoke or drink, we wouldn't have problems with ADHD and depression. Of course, I think there's some (just a little bit of) wisdom in Nordau's words. I don't want to eat arsenic tainted food and drugs are bad for you, but I hesitate. Are drinking and drugs a symptom or the problem?

Nordau says:

The drinker (and apparently the smoker also) begets enfeebled children, hereditarily fatigued or degenerated, and these drink and smoke in their turn, because they are fatigued.

Fatigued, respiratory conditions and fetal alcohol syndrome, I say potato and Nordau says patatto. But then, I love Victorian words for alcoholism and alcoholics. Nordau throws in a little misogyny for good measure.

The erotomaniac 'degenerate' stands in the same position to the woman as a dipsomaniac to intoxicating drinks. Magnan has given an appalling picture of the struggles waged in the mind of a dipsomaniac by the passionate eagerness for the bottle, and the loathing and horror of it.

Now, I've been mocking Nordau, but the essence of what he says in that last quote is ahead of its time - that is until later when he equates "dipsomania" or "madness for drink" with all of the other madnesses of his time, including: "aichmophobia" the fear of pointed objects; "arithmomania" the madness for numbers; and "oniomania" a madness for buying (I really like that last one). Though the Victorians had their crazies and their teatotallers, they didn't really understand alcoholism or addiction as a disease. In the quote above, Nordau recognizes the struggle of addiction, as if he sat in on one of today's AA meetings. Only a few doctors in the 1890s, mostly working with Dr. Norman Shanks Kerr (1834-1899) thought of abstinence from alcohol as a cure for "dipsomania."

Kerr was recognized in London as an avid support of the Temperance Movement and was a strict teatotaller. His was the radical idea that the only permanent cure for sever alcohol withdrawal (delirium tremens) was to stop drinking permanently. Oh course, he still treated the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal with opium, but who's perfect?

Wilde preferred opium to alcohol, but understood that:

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.

Nordau felt that:

Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime.

Nordau, somewhat rightly, believed that Wilde achieved more through his personality than through any effort or work. Nordau recognized Wilde as the representative of the Aesthetic Movement in England. Meanwhile, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes:

Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.

W.B. Yeats said:

The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober.

H.G. Wells advised against taking alcohol regularly and compared it to polite conversation:

Speech, no doubt, is a valuable gift, but at the same time it is a gift that may be abused. What is regarded as polite conversation is, I hold, such an abuse. Alcohol, opium, tea, are all very excellent things in their way; but imagine continuous alcohol, an incessant opium, or to receive, ocean-like, a perennially flowing river of tea! That is my objection to this conversation: its continuousness.

In my research, I got onto this topic in response to the question: why do writers drink (there's a new book about it and here's a review). But Wells gives me no reason to assume that writers drink with more enthusiasm than anyone else. Bram Stoker's first book, The Primrose Path, is a moralistic romance novel about a protagonist who succumbs to alcoholism and eventually lets it ruin his life. Stoker was known to have practiced moderation in all things. Perhaps, the question I better ask might be: why would writers drink.

When I talk to other writers, artists and even academics, the guilty truth we share is that it feels like we are living the dream. Wells reinforces that notion In a Modern Utopia (1905):

The conditions of physical happiness will be better understood in Utopia, it will be worth while to be well there, and the intelligent citizen will watch himself closely. Half and more of the drunkenness of earth is an attempt to lighten dull days and hopelessly sordid and disagreeable lives, and in Utopia they do not suffer these things. Assuredly Utopia will be temperate, not only drinking, but eating with the soundest discretion

And yet, inside that passage there is a certain hedonism. Is it hedonistic to have all of what you want?

Good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic! The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful. What more can you want?

In that passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray, we have hedonism in the form of drinking, smoking and the pursuit of sex. We have the idea that getting what you want should make you happy. Does having everything you want and not being happy make you feel guilty? Do people drink because they are unhappy?

I digress for fear of running into a long meditation on happiness and self-medication. Self-medicating is, I think, what Nordau felt the degenerate thought he or she was doing by drinking. He just found artists more despicable for finding it beautiful.

To that effect he says:

When Raffaelli paints shockingly degraded absinthe-drinkers in the low drinking dens of the purlieus of Paris, we clearly feel his profound pity at the sight of these fallen human beings, and this emotion we ex-perience as a morally beautiful one. In like manner we have not a momentary doubt of the morality of the artist's emotions whenwe behold Callot's pictures of the horrors of war, or the bleeding, purulent saints of Zurbaran, or the monsters of Breughel van der Holle, or when we read the murder scene in Dostojevsky's Raskolnikow. These emotions are beautiful. Sympathy with them gives us a feeling of pleasure. Against this feeling the displeasure caused by the repulsiveness of the work cannot prevail. When, however, the work betrays the indifference of the author to the evil or ugliness he depicts, nay, his predilection for it, then the abhorrence provoked by the work isintensified by all the disgust which the author's aberration of instinct inspires in us, and the aggregate impression is one of keenest displeasure. Those who share the emotions of the author, and hence are with him attracted and pleasurably excited by what is repugnant, diseased and evil, are the degenerate.

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Egypt in London in the 1890s

In 1891, Marcel Schwob described Oascar Wilde as:

A big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more. While he ate - and he ate little - he never stopped smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes. A terrible absinthe-drinker, through which he got his visions and desires.

Wilde himself at least once described cigarettes according to their nationality in expressing his disdain for American cigarettes. I wonder if Schwob called Wilde's cigarettes Egyptian because they were or if this was some Victorian way for describing drugs. Wilde most certainly had a substance abuse problem and alcoholism ran in his family. Egyptology also ran in the Wilde family, so smoking real Egyptian cigarettes is something Wilde might have shown off.

William Wilde, Oscar Wilide's father collected artifacts of Egypt and Greece, then referred to as antiquities. At age 24, William Wilde was elected to membership in the Royal Irish Academy and many of the antiquities in the house where Oscar grew up were gathered with his father's own hands in Egypt, "before all the archeology happened," as his mother would say.

The Wildes were not alone. Victorians were crazy for Egypt.

“Every one, high and low, has heard of Egypt and its primeval wonders,” declares Georg Ebers with confidence in his two-volume Egypt: Descriptive, Historical, and Picturesque, published in 1878. “The child knows the names of the good and the wicked pharaohs before it has learned those of the princes of its own country.” Ebers is at a loss to explain this phenomenon, however; he can merely query the reader: “Why is it that its [Egypt’s] name, its history, its natural peculiarities and its monuments, affect and interest us in quite a different manner from those of the other nations of antiquity?” - Victorian Web

My best explanation for their fascination with Egyptology rests in Victorian ideas about empire. Victorians didn't view empire as just good for England; metaphors about England as the mother of her empire are still traced through colonial history worldwide. When Victorians, like William Wilde, brought antiquities into their homes, they actually believed they were doing something to help preserve Egyptian culture.

Preserving antiquities at home also served as an important class symbol: knowledge of Egyptian history; experience travelling through Egypt; the means and ability to collect and preserve antiquities; all attested to the value and status of one's household in Victorian Society.

With all of this in his background, Oscar Wilde dedicated his poem, "The Sphinx," to the observant Marcel Schwob, though I don't know what he was smoking. Having opened with words from Schwob about Wilde, I leave you with Wilde's poem to Schwob.

The Sphinx

(To Marcel Schwob in friendship and in admiration)

In a dim corner of my room for longer than

my fancy thinks

A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me

through the shifting gloom.

Inviolate and immobile she does not rise she

does not stir

For silver moons are naught to her and naught

to her the suns that reel.

Red follows grey across the air, the waves of

moonlight ebb and flow

But with the Dawn she does not go and in the

night-time she is there.

Dawn follows Dawn and Nights grow old and

all the while this curious cat

Lies couching on the Chinese mat with eyes of

satin rimmed with gold.

Upon the mat she lies and leers and on the

tawny throat of her

Flutters the soft and silky fur or ripples to her

pointed ears.

Come forth, my lovely seneschal! so somnolent,

so statuesque!

Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman

and half animal!

Come forth my lovely languorous Sphinx! and

put your head upon my knee!

And let me stroke your throat and see your

body spotted like the Lynx!

And let me touch those curving claws of yellow

ivory and grasp

The tail that like a monstrous Asp coils round

your heavy velvet paws!

A thousand weary centuries are thine

while I have hardly seen

Some twenty summers cast their green for

Autumn's gaudy liveries.

But you can read the Hieroglyphs on the

great sandstone obelisks,

And you have talked with Basilisks, and you

have looked on Hippogriffs.

O tell me, were you standing by when Isis to

Osiris knelt?

And did you watch the Egyptian melt her union

for Antony

And drink the jewel-drunken wine and bend

her head in mimic awe

To see the huge proconsul draw the salted tunny

from the brine?

And did you mark the Cyprian kiss white Adon

on his catafalque?

And did you follow Amenalk, the God of

Heliopolis?

And did you talk with Thoth, and did you hear

the moon-horned Io weep?

And know the painted kings who sleep beneath

the wedge-shaped Pyramid?

Lift up your large black satin eyes which are

like cushions where one sinks!

Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx! and sing mev all your memories!

Sing to me of the Jewish maid who wandered

with the Holy Child,

And how you led them through the wild, and

how they slept beneath your shade.

Sing to me of that odorous green eve when

crouching by the marge

You heard from Adrian's gilded barge the

laughter of Antinous

And lapped the stream and fed your drouth and

watched with hot and hungry stare

The ivory body of that rare young slave with

his pomegranate mouth!

Sing to me of the Labyrinth in which the twi-

formed bull was stalled!

Sing to me of the night you crawled across the

temple's granite plinth

When through the purple corridors the screaming

scarlet Ibis flew

In terror, and a horrid dew dripped from the

moaning Mandragores,

And the great torpid crocodile within the tank

shed slimy tears,

And tare the jewels from his ears and staggered

back into the Nile,

And the priests cursed you with shrill psalms as

in your claws you seized their snake

And crept away with it to slake your passion by

the shuddering palms.

Who were your lovers? who were they

who wrestled for you in the dust?

Which was the vessel of your Lust? What

Leman had you, every day?

Did giant Lizards come and crouch before you

on the reedy banks?

Did Gryphons with great metal flanks leap on

you in your trampled couch?

Did monstrous hippopotami come sidling toward

you in the mist?

Did gilt-scaled dragons writhe and twist with

passion as you passed them by?

And from the brick-built Lycian tomb what

horrible Chimera came

With fearful heads and fearful flame to breed

new wonders from your womb?

Or had you shameful secret quests and did

you harry to your home

Some Nereid coiled in amber foam with curious

rock crystal breasts?

Or did you treading through the froth call to

the brown Sidonian

For tidings of Leviathan, Leviathan or

Behemoth?

Or did you when the sun was set climb up the

cactus-covered slope

To meet your swarthy Ethiop whose body was

of polished jet?

Or did you while the earthen skiffs dropped

down the grey Nilotic flats

At twilight and the flickering bats flew round

the temple's triple glyphs

Steal to the border of the bar and swim across

the silent lake

And slink into the vault and make the Pyramid

your lupanar

Till from each black sarcophagus rose up the

painted swathed dead?

Or did you lure unto your bed the ivory-horned

Tragelaphos?

Or did you love the god of flies who plagued

the Hebrews and was splashed

With wine unto the waist? or Pasht, who had

green beryls for her eyes?

Or that young god, the Tyrian, who was more

amorous than the dove

Of Ashtaroth? or did you love the god of the

Assyrian

Whose wings, like strange transparent talc, rose

high above his hawk-faced head,

Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with

rods of Oreichalch?

Or did huge Apis from his car leap down and

lay before your feet

Big blossoms of the honey-sweet and honey-

coloured nenuphar?

How subtle-secret is your smile! Did you

love none then? Nay, I know

Great Ammon was your bedfellow! He lay with

you beside the Nile!

The river-horses in the slime trumpeted when

they saw him come

Odorous with Syrian galbanum and smeared with

spikenard and with thyme.

He came along the river bank like some tall

galley argent-sailed,

He strode across the waters, mailed in beauty,

and the waters sank.

He strode across the desert sand: he reached

the valley where you lay:

He waited till the dawn of day: then touched

your black breasts with his hand.

You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame:

you made the horned god your own:

You stood behind him on his throne: you called

him by his secret name.

You whispered monstrous oracles into the

caverns of his ears:

With blood of goats and blood of steers you

taught him monstrous miracles.

White Ammon was your bedfellow! Your

chamber was the steaming Nile!

And with your curved archaic smile you watched

his passion come and go.

With Syrian oils his brows were bright:

and wide-spread as a tent at noon

His marble limbs made pale the moon and lent

the day a larger light.

His long hair was nine cubits' span and coloured

like that yellow gem

Which hidden in their garment's hem the

merchants bring from Kurdistan.

His face was as the must that lies upon a vat of

new-made wine:

The seas could not insapphirine the perfect azure

of his eyes.

His thick soft throat was white as milk and

threaded with thin veins of blue:

And curious pearls like frozen dew were

broidered on his flowing silk.

On pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was

too bright to look upon:

For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous

ocean-emerald,

That mystic moonlit jewel which some diver of

the Colchian caves

Had found beneath the blackening waves and

carried to the Colchian witch.

Before his gilded galiot ran naked vine-wreathed

corybants,

And lines of swaying elephants knelt down to

draw his chariot,

And lines of swarthy Nubians bare up his litter

as he rode

Down the great granite-paven road between the

nodding peacock-fans.

The merchants brought him steatite from Sidon

in their painted ships:

The meanest cup that touched his lips was

fashioned from a chrysolite.

The merchants brought him cedar chests of rich

apparel bound with cords:

His train was borne by Memphian lords: young

kings were glad to be his guests.

Ten hundred shaven priests did bow to Ammon's

altar day and night,

Ten hundred lamps did wave their light through

Ammon's carven house--and now

Foul snake and speckled adder with their young

ones crawl from stone to stone

For ruined is the house and prone the great

rose-marble monolith!

Wild ass or trotting jackal comes and couches

in the mouldering gates:

Wild satyrs call unto their mates across the

fallen fluted drums.

And on the summit of the pile the blue-faced

ape of Horus sits

And gibbers while the fig-tree splits the pillars

of the peristyle

The god is scattered here and there: deep

hidden in the windy sand

I saw his giant granite hand still clenched in

impotent despair.

And many a wandering caravan of stately

negroes silken-shawled,

Crossing the desert, halts appalled before the

neck that none can span.

And many a bearded Bedouin draws back his

yellow-striped burnous

To gaze upon the Titan thews of him who was

thy paladin.

Go, seek his fragments on the moor and

wash them in the evening dew,

And from their pieces make anew thy mutilated

paramour!

Go, seek them where they lie alone and from

their broken pieces make

Thy bruised bedfellow! And wake mad passions

in the senseless stone!

Charm his dull ear with Syrian hymns! he loved

your body! oh, be kind,

Pour spikenard on his hair, and wind soft rolls

of linen round his limbs!

Wind round his head the figured coins! stain

with red fruits those pallid lips!

Weave purple for his shrunken hips! and purple

for his barren loins!

Away to Egypt! Have no fear. Only one

God has ever died.

Only one God has let His side be wounded by a

soldier's spear.

But these, thy lovers, are not dead. Still by the

hundred-cubit gate

Dog-faced Anubis sits in state with lotus-lilies

for thy head.

Still from his chair of porphyry gaunt Memnon

strains his lidless eyes

Across the empty land, and cries each yellow

morning unto thee.

And Nilus with his broken horn lies in his black

and oozy bed

And till thy coming will not spread his waters on

the withering corn.

Your lovers are not dead, I know. They will

rise up and hear your voice

And clash their cymbals and rejoice and run to

kiss your mouth! And so,

Set wings upon your argosies! Set horses to

your ebon car!

Back to your Nile! Or if you are grown sick of

dead divinities

Follow some roving lion's spoor across the copper-

coloured plain,

Reach out and hale him by the mane and bid

him be your paramour!

Couch by his side upon the grass and set your

white teeth in his throat

And when you hear his dying note lash your

long flanks of polished brass

And take a tiger for your mate, whose amber

sides are flecked with black,

And ride upon his gilded back in triumph

through the Theban gate,

And toy with him in amorous jests, and when

he turns, and snarls, and gnaws,

O smite him with your jasper claws! and bruise

him with your agate breasts!

Why are you tarrying? Get hence! I

weary of your sullen ways,

I weary of your steadfast gaze, your somnolent

magnificence.

Your horrible and heavy breath makes the light

flicker in the lamp,

And on my brow I feel the damp and dreadful

dews of night and death.

Your eyes are like fantastic moons that shiver

in some stagnant lake,

Your tongue is like a scarlet snake that dances

to fantastic tunes,

Your pulse makes poisonous melodies, and your

black throat is like the hole

Left by some torch or burning coal on Saracenic

tapestries.

Away! The sulphur-coloured stars are hurrying

through the Western gate!

Away! Or it may be too late to climb their silent

silver cars!

See, the dawn shivers round the grey gilt-dialled

towers, and the rain

Streams down each diamonded pane and blurs

with tears the wannish day.

What snake-tressed fury fresh from Hell, with

uncouth gestures and unclean,

Stole from the poppy-drowsy queen and led you

to a student's cell?

What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept

through the curtains of the night,

And saw my taper burning bright, and knocked,

and bade you enter in?

Are there not others more accursed, whiter with

leprosies than I?

Are Abana and Pharphar dry that you come here

to slake your thirst?

Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous

animal, get hence!

You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me

what I would not be.

You make my creed a barren sham, you wake

foul dreams of sensual life,

And Atys with his blood-stained knife were

better than the thing I am.

False Sphinx! False Sphinx! By reedy Styx

old Charon, leaning on his oar,

Waits for my coin. Go thou before, and leave

me to my crucifix,

Whose pallid burden, sick with pain, watches

the world with wearied eyes,

And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps

for every soul in vain.

Oscar Wilde (1894)

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