‘Neither for God, Nor for His Enemies’: Wilde’s ‘Theoretikos’ and Pater’s Essay on Botticelli

Abstract

IN an unsigned notice published in the Saturday Review, 23 July 1881, an anonymous reviewer of Wilde’s Poems (1881) complained that while ‘not without the traces of cleverness’, the poetry was ‘marred everywhere by imitation’.1 The Oxford Union rejected a presentation copy of Wilde’s Poems that same year on the grounds of perceived plagiarism, a charge which has been levelled at Wilde frequently in the years thereafter.2 But it is easy today to overlook the ways in which these imitative habits occasionally may have helped Wilde to place his poetry into the context of wider contemporary debates. It is one such quotation in Wilde’s poem ‘Theoretikos’, taken from Walter Pater’s essay on Botticelli (1870) and so far missed by the critical heritage, that concerns the present note. ‘Theoretikos’ was written around 1877–78 and first published in Poems.3 A Petrarchan sonnet, Wilde begins by lamenting how ‘this mighty empire hath but feet of clay’ (l. 1), referring to the decision of the Disraeli government not to intervene in the Ottoman misrule of the Balkans, before bemoaning the lack of a Wordsworth-figure to help focus the national mind (ll. 5–6), recalling how Wordsworth bemoans the lack of a Milton-figure in ‘London 1802’ (ll. 1–3).4 Attacking contemporary capitalist Britain as nothing more than a ‘vile traffic-house, where day by day / Wisdom and reverence are sold at mart’ (ll. 8–9), Wilde envisages a nation in a state of crisis which is as much spiritual as religious. His following image, in which ‘rude people rage with ignorant cries / Against an heritage of centuries’ (ll. 8–11), is perhaps intended to echo Matthew Arnold’s enigmatic final line to ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), ‘where ignorant armies clash at night’ (l. 37).5 Wilde’s poem, however, continues with a volta in the twelfth line: