Pater envisions his critical activity under a public gaze, and thereby structures his aesthet- icism through the social forms and psychology that it ostensibly re- pudiates, those of Victorian gentility.

"The world," Newman writes, mistrusts innocence as "craft" because "sobriety, self-restraint, control of word and feeling have about them an air of being artificial, because they are not natural; and of being artful, because artificial." Thus self- restraint, he continues, "is the first thing which makes holy persons seem wanting in openness and manliness.

Georg Simmel points out in "The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies," That which we can see through plainly to its last ground, shows us therewith the limit of its attraction. . If the utmost attractiveness of another person is to be preserved for us, it must be presented to us in part in the form of vagueness or impenetrability. This is the only substitute which the great majority of people can offer for that attractive value which the small minority possess through the inexhaustibility of their inner life and growth

The trope of arcane wisdom thus invites thefin-de- siecle celebration of art as a dangerous influence, as in the trope of "the fatal book." And Pater's rhetoric clearly suggests a calculated affiliation of his aestheticism with homoerotic subcultures that still remain shadowy in recent social and literary histories of Victorian England.3"

But it is important to note that the rhetoric of secrecy is not inevitably the expressive veil of a specifically homoerotic desire. Indeed, to draw this inference would seem to reproduce the very practice that Newman analyzes in his sermon on "Innocence and Wisdom": "the world," disturbed by the secrecy of those who withdraw from its scrutiny, interprets the transgression as a mode of gender deviance. One facet of the burden of Victorian manliness is a deep mistrust of (which is of course inseparable from a fascination with) secrecy:

ritualized devotion as a means of giving shape and solemnity to a life of aesthetic experience -of realizing aestheticism as what Foucault has called a technology of the self.?5

Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater's Aestheticism
Author(s): James Eli AdamsSource: ELH, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 441-466Published