The depiction of women in the illustrated works of Pierre Louys

by Paul Gervais

The illustrated novels of Pierre Louys are instructive in many ways. Primarily, of course, they reveal evolving artistic responses to the author’s prose and verse, thereby not just illustrating his personal vision but demonstrating- indirectly- what book purchasers were understood to want, and what publishers and their commissioned artists believed they could offer them, within the parameters of law and public decency. In other words, the nature of illustrations can be a record of changes in society- in attitudes to sexuality, gender and the status and rights of women.

Louys’ first books appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century, notably Les Chansons de Bilitis in 1894 and Aphrodite in 1896. The earliest illustrated editions are distinctly reflective of their era, tacitly articulating contemporary attitudes towards the female gender and the position of women in society. Librairie Borel‘s 1899 edition of Aphrodite, illustrated by Antoine Calbet, is a case in point: his depictions of Chrysis reflect the Academic tradition of life studies, derived from the classical artistic tradition since the Renaissance, and the young Galilean courtesan is depicted very much in the style of Greek statues of Aphrodite and paintings of Venus by Botticelli, Tiziano Vecelli and others thereafter.

The title pages of the Calbet edition

Likewise, when Georges Rochegrosse provided plates for an edition of Ariadne in 1904, what he supplied was a very revealing reflection of the period’s conceptions of bacchantes- frenzied women. In the plate illustrated below, they are seen wreathed in ivy and flowers and leopard skin, about to tear apart the helpless Ariadne. Elsewhere in the same volume, Greek ladies were presented as sedate, respectable, elegant, graceful and beautiful- as in the illustration that accompanied the preamble to The House on the Nile by Paul Gervais, which is seen at the head of this post.

As I have described in other posts, numerous further illustrated editions of the various books written by Louys were to follow, both before and after his decease in 1925. A constant feature of these was women in greater or lesser states of undress, plates that faithfully responded to the text but also very consciously appealed to the primarily male collectors of fine art limited editions of books. Amongst these many examples, the most interesting are probably those designed by women. Those volumes worked on by Suzanne Ballivet, Mariette Lydis and Clara Tice are notable for the quality of their work and for the fact that the latter two were lesbian and brought their own sense of eroticism to their reactions to the texts. So, for example, in her plates for the 1934 edition of Les Chansons de Bilitis, Lydis’ vision of female lovers was far more intimate and subtly sensual than most of the works produced by male contemporaries- such as J A Bresval (see below). Other women who worked on the various titles by Louys included Renee Ringel (Aphrodite, 1944), Yna Majeska (Psyche, 1928), Guily Joffrin (Psyche, 1972) and editions of Bilitis illustrated by Jeanne Mammen, Genia Minache (1950), Carola Andries (1962) and Monique Rouver (1967). The frequency with which female illustrators were employed as the century passed is noticeable, although I hesitate to identify a distinctly feminine style.

Maritte Lydis, plate for Bilitis, 1934

Post-war, new editions of Louys introduced us to new conceptions of his female characters. J. A. Bresval illustrated an edition of Bilitis in 1957, his figures being very much inspired by contemporary film stars like Gina Lollobrigida and Brigitte Bardot. The women have a dark-haired fulsomeness typical of the period; the eroticism is rather cliched, such as the frontispiece to the book, which shows Bilitis with a lover: the latter kneels before her partner, embracing her waist and kissing her stomach; the standing woman cups her breasts in her hands and throws back her head in a highly stereotypical soft-porn rendering of female ecstasy.

However, by 1961 and Raymond Brenot’s watercolours for a new edition of Sanguines, we see a new aesthetic of the female body beginning to emerge: the bosoms may be just as fantastical, but there is a slenderness and, in some of the clothes, a sense of a more liberated and relaxed mood. Pierre-Laurent (Raymond) Brenot (1913-98) was a painter who was also very much in demand to design record sleeves, advertisements and fashion plates (for such couturiers as Dior, Balenciaga, Ricci and Lanvin). More tellingly, he is known as the ‘father of the French pin-up’- consider, for example, his advert for lingerie manufacturer Jessos- “Comme maman, je porte un Jessos” declares a young teen with pigtails, seated with her blouse unbuttoned to reveal her bra (“just like my mum’s”); I have discussed this style of marketing in another post. Brenot’s poster designs, for consumer goods, holiday destinations and films and theatres, regularly featured glamorous young women and, when this work declined during the later 1960s, he returned to painting, producing many young female nudes.

Brenot, Parrhasius in ‘The Wearer of Purple’ from Sanguines

What has to be observed, though, is that most of the nudity portrayed by Brenot was not justified by the actual stories in Sanguines. There are some naked slaves in The Wearer of Purple (see below), and Callisto in A New Sensation does share a bed with the narrator, but most of the rest of the stories are really quite respectable and sex-free (by the standards of Louys), being more concerned with psychology than sexuality. What we see, therefore, is evidence for the tendency to treat the works of Louys as a platform for erotic illustration. Frequently, this was a distinct element in the author’s stories, but it seems that he had acquired a reputation for sexiness which was then applied more liberally, presumably in the knowledge that the name would sell. The same criticism can, in truth, be made of Georges Rochegrosse’s depiction of the bacchae in the 1904 edition of Ariadne (see earlier): what he depicted might perhaps be implied in the text, but what Louys wrote doesn’t wholly warrant the nudity that we see:

“They wore fox skins tied over their left shoulders. Their hands waved tree branches and shook garlands of ivy. Their hair was so heavy with flowers that their necks bent backwards; the folds of their breasts streamed with sweat, the reflections on their thighs were setting suns, and their howls were speckled with drool.”

Ariadne, c.2

Brenot, Callisto in ‘A New Sensation’ from Sanguines

The men who feature in Brenot’s illustrations often seem hesitant, ill at ease or, even, embarrassed at being discovered with the women in their company- his take on the ‘satyrs’ with nymph in a scene from ‘The Wearer of Purple’ is a case in point. In Louys’ story, this is an incident involving a slave girl being assaulted by two other servants so as to create a titillating composition for the the artist Parrhasius to paint. As we can see in the reproduction below, the satyrs appear afraid of the young woman, having lost all their accustomed priapism, whilst she strikes me as indifferent to their presence and in fully control of the situation. Given Brenot’s later output, it’s almost certainly overstating things to say that these plates reflect shifts in social attitudes.

Brenot, two satyrs & a nymph in ‘The Wearer of Purple’ in Sanguines

Coming right up to date, the 1999 edition of Aphrodite demonstrates how visions of women may have developed and advanced (or not). The book was issued in three volumes, the first two being illustrated by two male comic book artists, Milo Manara and Georges Bess respectively. Both have distinctly erotic styles and the results strike me as being, in essence, highly accomplished and artistic reproductions of glamour photography and lesbian porn; for example, George Bess’ picture of the reclining woman, which faces the start of Book 2, chapter 1 of the story, seems to me to be drawn in a style very much influenced by Mucha or Georges du Feure: the streaming hair and the encroaching, twisting foliage all have the hallmarks of Art Nouveau (which is of course highly appropriate given the publication date of the original book). In the modern version, Chrysis is regularly depicted in intimate scenes alone, with her maid Djala or with the two girls Rhodis and Myrtocleia. With their tousled hair, pouting lips and pneumatic breasts, these women are very much the late twentieth century ideal. Most of the time, they are presented as being more interested in each other than in any of the male characters in the story, but my response is that there are really rather high-quality examples of fairly standard pornographic obsessions. When we look at them, it’s worth recalling Pierre Louys’ own description of his heroine, when he wrote to the painter Albert Besnard asking to paint her:

“Chrysis, as womanly as possible- tall, not skinny, a very ‘beautiful girl.’ Nothing vague or elusive in the forms. All parts of her body have their own expression, apart from their participation in the beauty of the whole. Hair golden brown, almost Venetian; very lively and eventful, not at all like a river. Of primary importance in the type of Chrysis, the mouth having all the appetites, thick and moist- but interesting […] Painted lips, nipples and nails. Depilated armpits. Twenty years old; but twenty years in Africa.”

Aphrodite, chapter 1, Milo Manara, 1999

Bess, plate for Aphrodite, 1999, Book 2, c.1, ‘The Garden of the Goddess’

A fascinating contrast to the the first two volumes of the 1999 edition is to be found in the third, illustrated by Claire Wendling (born 1967). She is a French author of comic books and her response to the text is interesting because it is so much darker and less obviously ‘sexy’ than that of her male collaborators. The plates are, literally, dark in tone and, although they tend to focus on solo female nudes, rather than lascivious eroticism is there is a mood of mental and physical suffering entirely appropriate to the final section of the book, in which Chrysis is arrested, sentenced to death, executed and buried. Her cover image evokes- for me- thoughts of Gustav Klimt in its decoration, but the twisted, crouched posture of the woman doesn’t look seductive- rather she’s supplicatory or, possibly, predatory.

At the start of this post I proposed that the book illustrations published with successive editions of the works of Pierre Louys can be a record of changes in society- in attitudes to sexuality, gender and the status and rights of women. I think that this is true, but that the evidence does not necessarily reveal huge steps forward in those areas. Far more women are involved now in commercial art, and the works of Louys provide vehicles for the expression of lesbian desire on their own terms: albeit in the service of illustrating books written by a man in which his sympathetic views of same-sex attraction compete with heterosexual masculine eroticism. Art styles have evolved, but the attitudes expressed by what’s depicted have not necessarily developed at the same pace.

Pan- Gone but not forgotten?

Verrirt/ Lost by Franz von Stuck (1891)

The composer and First World War poet Ivor Gurney wrote a little lament for Pan as the god of nature that reflects a common sense, at the close of the Great War, that much of the hope and revived interest in the Greek deity that had suffused British culture in late Victorian and Edwardian times had dissipated. In addition, the poem is as likely to reflect Gurney’s own sense of despair and professional frustration and failure in the early 1920s, as the depression that was to hospitalise him for the remainder of his life descended. 

“What was dear to Pan is dear to him no more,

He answers prayers never- nor ever appears-

And so sore a loss is this to his lovers

They play never, the sweet reed sounds no more

In the oak coppice- or the Severn poplar shade

Silver hearted… softly wailing at eve,

The silent country folk no more bring gifts

They delighted in- nor the new pipe greenly made.”

Gurney, What was dear to Pan

I think there is an echo too of a common conceit in Gurney’s verse, that the Cotswold Hills of Gloucestershire, once the site of many Roman villas, still bore traces of those ancient Roman settlers- although plainly in this case the incursions of the modern world were driving them away. Pan himself is affirmed as a beloved deity of farming folk, associated with music and green vegetation. The mood, though, is wistful, evocative of abandonment and loss.

Not all poets were convinced that Christianity and mechanical farming, transport (and warfare) had banished the Great God. The poet Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) wrote the poem Old and New to celebrate that very displacement of the old deities by Jesus, but (in my opinion anyway) he made the older ways sound like a lot more fun…

“Come, Hesper, and ye Gods of mighty waters,

Ye nymphs and Dryades,

Come, all the choir of white Pierian daughters,

And girls of lakes and seas,

Evoe! and Evoe lo! crying,

Fill all the earth and air ; Evoe Io!

And the hanging woods, replying,

Shall shout the echo there!

All day in breathless swoon or heavy slumber.

We lay among the flowers.

But now the stars break forth in countless number

To watch the dewy hours ;

And now lacchus, beautiful and glowing,

Adown the hill-side comes,

With tabrets shaken high, and trumpets blowing,

And resonance of drums.

The leopard-skin is round his smooth white shoulders,

The vine-branch round his hair ;

The eyes that rouse delight in maid-beholders,

Are glittering, glowworm-fair ;

The king of all the provinces of pleasure,

Lord of a wide domain,

He comes and brings delight that knows no measure,

A full Saturnian reign.

O take me, Maenads, to your foxskin-chorus.

Pink-lipped like volute-shells,

For I must follow where your chant sonorous

Roars down the forest-dells ;

The sacred frenzy rends my throat and bosom,

I shout, and whirl where He,

Our vine-god, tosses like some pale blood-blossom,

Borne on a windy sea.

Around the car, with streaming hair and frantic,

The Maenads and wild gods.

And shaggy fauns and wood-girls corybantic

Toss high the ivy-rods ;

Brown limbs with white limbs hotly intertwining

Whirl in a maddening dance.

Till, when at last Orion is declining,

We slip into a trance.

The satyr’s heart is faintly, faintly beating ;

The white-lipped nymph is mute ;

lacchus up the western slope is fleeting,

Uncheered by horn or lute ;

Hushed, hushed are all the shouting and the singing,

The rapture, the delight,

For out into the cold grey air upspringing,

The morning-star shines bright.”

Gosse, Old & New

Gosse’s verse is crammed with classical references. Hesper is Hesperus, the planet Venus in the evening and son of the dawn goddess Eos (or Aurora). The Pierides were the nine royal sisters who competed with the Muses song contest and, when they were defeated, were turned into birds. Iacchus is another name for Dionysos, and those ecstatic, frenzied sea nymphs, dryads and bacchae we’ve also met before. Evoe Io is the traditional cry of the maenads and bacchantes, an exclamation of joy addressed to and naming the divinities Dionysos and Isis. It was also used in poetry by Aleister Crowley, who more seriously desired to invoke Bacchus.

Gosse wanted to argue that the Dionysian revels had been suppressed and displaced (driven off by the ‘Morning Star,’ by whom he meant Jesus- whom he addressed in the second part of this poem, entitled A.D.). However, as I have demonstrated before, other poets did not want to abandon those dreams of freedom and unrestrained expression, so that- even after several millennia- we’re not yet fully prepared to accept that the Great God Pan and his entourage are truly dead.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau: glossy nymphs and peasant girls

Nymphs & Satyr (1873)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was a French academic painter. In his realistic-looking paintings, he often used mythological themes, giving modern interpretations to classical subjects, with an notable emphasis on the female human body. As one of the principal Salon painters of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde so that, by the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art had fallen out of favour with the public, although he has been rediscovered since the 1980s.

The Birth of Venus (1879)

Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle to a family of wine and olive oil merchants. In 1839, he was sent to study for the priesthood at a Catholic college in Pons, where he learned to draw and paint from Louis Sage, who had studied under Ingres. Bouguereau then reluctantly left his studies to return to live with his family in Bordeaux, where he met a local artist, Charles Marionneau, and commenced formal training at the Municipal School of Drawing and Painting in November 1841. He was the best pupil in his class and decided to become an artist in Paris. To fund the move, he sold portraits, finishing 33 in three months- early evidence of his formidable commitment and work rate.

Before the Bath (1900)

Bouguereau became a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1846. To supplement his formal training in drawing, he attended anatomical dissections and studied historical costumes and archaeology. He was admitted to the studio of François-Édouard Picot, where he studied painting in the academic style, an approach that placed the highest status on historical and mythological subjects. Absorbing these attitudes, Bouguereau determined to win the Prix de Rome, which would gain him a three-year residence in Rome, where, in addition taking formal lessons, he could study Renaissance art at first hand, as well as Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities.

Sewing (1898)

After three attempts, the young student won the Prix in 1850 and was able to move to Rome in January the following year. Over the next three years, Bouguereau explored the city and country, making sketches and watercolours as he went. He also studied classical literature, which influenced his subject choices for the rest of his career. He particularly revered Greek sculpture, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian. He also admired Rubens and Delacroix. An early reviewer observed how the artist had absorbed the lessons of the Italian masters: “Bouguereau has a natural instinct and knowledge of contour. The rhythms of the human body preoccupy him, and in recalling the happy results which, in this genre, the ancients and the artists of the sixteenth century arrived at, one can only congratulate [him] in attempting to follow in their footsteps … Raphael was inspired by the ancients … and no one accused him of not being original.” Raphael was a favourite of Bouguereau and he took this review as a high compliment. One of the requirements of the Prix de Rome was to complete a copy of Raphael’s The Triumph of Galatea. In many of his own works, he was to follow the same classical approach to composition, form, and subject matter whilst most of his religious paintings, crucifixions and Madonnas, are high sheen imitations of Renaissance originals.

The Little Marauder (1900)

Bouguereau’s career flourished after his trip to Rome. He received contracts to paint murals and other decorations in expensive homes, was commissioned to paint Emperor Napoleon III in 1856 and undertook decorations for the chapel of the newly constructed Saint-Clotilde in Paris. He was awarded the Legion of Honour in July 1859- the first of several honours. After this recognition, Bouguereau continued to receive prestigious commissions for portraits, decorations to private homes, public buildings, churches and from European royalty and his work was held in high regard (twelve of his paintings featured in the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 for example).

The Broken Pitcher (1891)

Bouguereau was a staunch traditionalist in both technique, style and content. His genre paintings and mythological themes were modern interpretations of Classical subjects, both pagan and Christian, with a focus on nude females. The idealised world of his paintings brought to life goddesses, nymphs, bathers, shepherdesses, and Madonnas in a way that appealed to wealthy art patrons of the era. He also used some of the religious and erotic symbolism of the ‘old masters,’ such as Greuze‘s symbol of the “broken pitcher” connoting lost innocence (see above).

Au bord de la mere

I first came across Bouguereau through his extravagant paintings of cupids, nymphs and satyrs, fantasies that are full of swarms of luscious flesh, but I then discovered that he also worked on more personal paintings, with realistic and rustic themes. There is a huge contrast between the vast, classical canvases with their writhing naked nymphs, and his more intimate studies of peasant girls working or at play in the countryside. These are clearly firmly positioned within the ‘Romantic’ child genre of image, symbolising the prevailing idea of childhood innocence to such an extent that the realist elements in the pictures- the need for children from poor families to labour alongside their parents- are very much diluted or glossed over (on the formulation and meanings of the ‘Romantic’ view of childhood, see Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 1998). The result of Bouguereau’s approach was that representations of leisure time (especially swimming) superseded the harsh realities of essential economic activity. The same activities are repeated endlessly, too: sewing, fetching water, even -in La tricoteuse (The Knitter) of 1884, working with thread at the same time as being by a well…

Girl by Stream (1888)

Bouguereau’s country maids can look winsome whatever they’re doing: whether that’s stealing fruit from neighbours’ orchards or looking guilty having been caught in the act (see The Marauder earlier, Petites Maraudeuses, The Mischievous One or En penitence). Their poverty is always picturesque, so that girls eating frugal meals in the fields, comprising just a hunk of bread, can be viewed affectionately. Bouguereau manages to render everything sweet and sentimental. His beggars (La Mendicante or Loin de pays ‘Far from Home’) aren’t in rags or dirty, for instance. The same is true of his gypsy girls, such as Gypsy Girl with a Basque Drum (i.e. a tambourine) of 1867, Gypsy Girls (1879) or The Bohemian (1890) who introduce an exotic, orientalist element to his catalogue of young females. These figures are barefoot and/ or carry musical instruments; their way of earning a living is precarious but they are again picturesquely poor.

Charming as Bouguereau’s country girls are, it has to be recognised that they all start to look the same. This may be because he made use of just a handful of models and because of the rapidity with which he turned out canvases, but there is also an impression of a clear, preferred ‘type’ comparable to John Waterhouse’s ‘ideal’ girl that you see time and again in his paintings- and even replicated side by side in the picture Hylas and the Nymphs. The work (such as it is) that these girls do is often contrived simply to make them look better. Gathering in harvest sheaves, gleaning, collecting berries, nuts or grapes, churning milk, picking flowers- these all locate the subjects in a natural setting and suggest purity, simplicity and freshness on the part of the model. This is frequently reinforced by their white blouses and dresses, which are always clean, despite their outdoor, labouring lifestyles. This highlights the true nature of Bouguereau’s naturalism and realism: it is frequently quite artificial- as demonstrated by the frequency with which there is a large cube of stone perfectly positioned for his subject to sit or lean upon…

La Gue (The Ford)

Bouguereau also perpetuated the ‘girl on a rock by water’ trope that Thomas Couture seems to have invented. In his hands, the Edenic elements are very clear, although he varies between reflective self-absorption and his preferred pose for most of his models- a direct awareness of our gaze as viewers. This can have the effect of making the observer feel like an intruder upon a private moment (understandably- the subject wished to bathe alone and we have trespassed upon her solitude). Then again, the artist partook of a common trend in art of the period, in that he sometimes made the young country women pictured a little too aware of the viewer. Overall, though, his figures are very saccharine and feel as if they may have been contrived to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.

La priere (The Prayer)

La Frillleuse (The Chilly Girl)

Enfant tenant des fleurs
Child Holding Flowers

From the mid-1870s, Bouguereau taught at the Académie Julian. Many of his pupils followed his academic style, but others went on to reject it- for instance Henri Matisse. We shall discuss other artists who faithfully perpetuated the look and themes of Bouguereau’s work in later posts. This made sense, certainly, for during his lifetime, he was considered to be one of the greatest painters in the world by the academic art community (and the buying public)- yet he was simultaneously loathed and condemned by the avant-garde, who viewed him as a competent technician who was hopelessly stuck in the past in terms of both style and content. Degas invented the term “Bouguereauté” to describe the “slick and artificial surfaces” that characterised his work. It is undeniably glossy and highly finished and even at the time some critics attacked his “feeble mawkishness” as being representative of the terminal decline of the old style of painting. convention.” Bouguereau himself that his work was driven by the demands of the marketplace: “What do you expect? You have to follow public taste, and the public only buys what it likes.”

Historians are divided as to whether Bouguereau simply pandered to the market with his genre paintings, or whether it was his aim to elevate the status of the French peasantry because of his admiration for their nobility and humility. The art historian John House has described Bouguereau’s genre scenes as “broadly idealist… treating his peasant women as if they were Raphael Madonnas.” As I mentioned before, there is rarely any suggestion of tiredness, want or ill-health. Generally his approach to the Naturalist style was highly commercial and there is no suggestion from the pictures that Bouguereau had strong moral or sociological opinions about the position of the rural poor.

For more information on Victorian era art, see details of my book Cherry Ripe on my publications page.

At the Foot of the Cliffs (1886)

Bouguereau was a dedicated painter, often completing twenty or more easel paintings in a single year. He claimed his time was worth one hundred francs a minute- and churned out the genre scenes at a rate that proved this. Even during the last years of his life, he would rise at dawn to paint six days a week and would continue in his studio until nightfall. Throughout the course of his lifetime, he is known to have painted at least 822 paintings, although many have been lost. This very productivity possibly didn’t assist the artist’s reputation, either during his life or after his death in 1905. It suggested mass-produced and uninspired works and with the rise of modernism he fell quickly out of fashion, although his work has been reappraised in more recent decades.

Girl with Bouquet (1896)

Jean Traynier- illustrator of Carmen & Pierre Louys

Carmen

Jean Traynier was a French illustrator who flourished during the 1940s and ’50s. Almost nothing is known about him, other than through his surviving published work. He was evidently one of a pool of illustrators working in Paris from the 1930s, drawn there by the employment opportunities offered by the booming luxury book trade, especially- as I’ve described previously- the thriving market for erotica, such as much of the material by Pierre Louys that was discovered and published after his death. As we’ll see shortly, this business continued throughout the Second World War- perhaps surprisingly.

Traynier’s work included illustrations for Albert Samain’s collection of poetry Au Jardin de l’enfant and Prosper Merimee’s Carmen (both 1943), The Song of Songs (1945), Robert Gilsoul’s Quinze Joies de mariage ‘The Fifteen Pleasures of Marriage,’ L’Idylle Venitienne (‘Venetian Idyll) by Gabriel Soulages and Henri de Montherlant’s La vie amoureuse de Monsieur de Guiscart ‘The love Life of Monsieur de Guiscart’ (all three in 1946), Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Beroul’s Romance of Tristan & Isolde (both 1947), Rousseau’s Social Contract (1953) and Point de Lendemain, ou la nuit merveilleuse (No Tomorrow, Or the Wonderful Night) by Dominique-Vivant Denon (1957).

The illustrations for the biblical Song of Songs are as proper as we would anticipate, but as the titles of some of these books may suggest, their content was racy and the plates mirrored the text- from the slightly saucy (Carmen) through images of topless women in silk knickers (Guiscart), to the predictably erotic Fifteen Pleasures of Marriage.

Traynier was especially daring with Denon’s No Tomorrow, which is illustrated with twenty highly explicit plates, showing couples in eighteenth century wigs engaged in some highly acrobatic intercourse, including one passionate couple with a strap-on. In fact, the style of these illustrations is familiar, for Traynier had already employed it eight years earlier when designing the plates for Pierre Louys‘ collection of erotic verse, Cydalise (1949). The title is simply a female name, although Louys’ inspiration may have come from the ballet, Cydalise et le chèvre-pied (‘Cydalise and the goat-foot’ or, preferably, ‘Cydalise and the satyr’). Composed by Léo Staats to a score by Gabriel Pierné, it was written in 1914-15 but, because of the First World War, was not performed until January 1923 at the Paris Opera. Louys is very likely to have been aware of the production and its premier and may have considered the name suitable for his book, given his heroine’s profession and the priapic propensities of satyrs.

from Les Quinzes joies

The manuscript of the poetry collection was (like many) undiscovered until after poet’s death in 1925. Many of these texts were rushed into print over the next couple of years. This was not the case with Cydalise, which may indicate that the original buyer purchased the document out of personal interest alone and that it was only later, perhaps because of changed circumstances or inheritance by an heir, that the decision was made to publish the work. It’s interesting to note that the preface is at pains to stress the authenticity of the text, given the tendency of imitators to cash in upon Louys’ name; at the same time, it compares the book’s rather belated appearance to a forgotten bottle of vintage wine being discovered in a cellar behind a bundle of sticks.

The book has only ever been issued in this one limited edition run of 265 copies, issued in a case and with sixteen plates by the artist. It is therefore very rare: for example, there is no copy in a library in the UK; I would have to go to Bibilotheque nationale de France in Paris to be able to consult the nearest accessible volume. The book is, consequently, the highly collectible, although copies seem to appear often enough on auction house websites.

Cydalise (so far as I can judge from the verses I have seen on page images displayed online by auction rooms and book dealers) concerns the training and work of a young prostitute by an older woman in the business. As Louys described in another of his books, L’Île aux dames (The Island of Women), it was typical for a sex worker to employ a maid, a younger female who was possibly her daughter, to assist her. This gosse (kid) would solicit business, deal with clients and gradually get more involved in the provision of sexual services before setting up on her own. The author seems to have been pretty familiar with these arrangements, but then his own journals and letters reveal that he was a regular visitor to brothels, at least early in his life.

The book is written in a style familiar with Louys, a sort of working class/ street slang, coarse and direct, which certainly appears to be authentic to the subject. Traynier’s plates are the same style of pen and ink design that he was to use again for No Tomorrow, except that in the case of Cydalise he has chosen a fin-de-siecle setting for the pictures, rather than pre-Revolutionary France. The plates are both realistic- depicting sexual activity- and fantastic, for instance showing a woman surrounded by gigantic phalli. Because of this content, I don’t think it’s suitable to feature images from either book here, but you can easily find them online if you wish. Nevertheless, I hope it may be clear that Traynier must have seemed like a very suitable artist to commission for the Louys title, having a track record in this kind of book, a readiness to produce images that matched the content and tone of the text they would sit beside and, as well, a clear and simple style with strong lines and bold designs.

In the same year, 1949, Traynier also supplied illustrations for an edition of Louys’ La Femme et le pantin (The Woman & the Puppet). This was one of a five volume set of the author’s works issued by Albin Michel. The story tells of a middle aged man who falls for a girl in her teens and is tormented by her, giving her money and gifts and never having his love requited. It is set in Spain, as Traynier’s illustrations make clear.

For more on the many works of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography of his available books. For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page.

.

Fauns and Nymphs in Popular Victorian Art

In previous posts I have examined how Pan and the satyrs were portrayed in book illustrations and erotic art- as well as in ‘Academy’ paintings– during the later nineteenth century and early twentieth. These images were often still relatively ‘specialist,’ only visible to those adults who went in search of them or could afford them. However, satyrs, fauns and nymphs also appeared in mass media, available to all age-groups: they decorated postcards and greetings cards. I am going to illustrate this discussion with examples published by the leading company, Raphael Tuck.

A set of six Tuck postcards on a fantasy theme dating from 1908 showed Pan playing his pipes, lying either in a meadow near a grazing goat or by a pool in the moonlight. These are very calm, peaceful scenes: no sign (of course) of the god’s sexual proclivities. Another card shows a rather more bacchanalian Pan wearing a wreath of vine leaves and cuddled up to a tiger by the sea. The god brandishes a wine cup- perhaps rather drunkenly, as the wine is slopping out; this is symbolic of his close associations with Dionysos/ Bacchus, but it might also explain his bravado with the big cat.

As we know, Pan and the satyrs would rather spend their time getting to know nymphs than drinking in the company of wild beasts, and the Tuck company produced quite a few nymph postcards. One series, titled Idylls, was issued in 1912 and is a set of six Valentines cards. They are all rather luridly pink coloured (presumably echoing the red roses of the love goddess Aphrodite) and show a nymph and some cupids in various woodland scenes, dreaming wistfully about a lover but never actually meeting the loved one. The nymph looks very fetching, wearing a nice off-the-shoulder Greek dress in gauzy fabric, her hair loosely bound up with a strip of cloth. A related Valentines series, Nymphs, was printed in black, white and blue and depicts a very similar, solitary nymph and her cupids/ putti, still awaiting the lover’s arrival.

Raphael Tuck also issued a series called Nymphs des bois (woodland nymphs) in France in 1905. The set depicts various young women in woodland scenes, admiring birds and flowers and such like. They’re not very well drawn and some of the nymphs look rather alarming (or alarmed), to be honest. The vaguely Greek clothes suggest we are encountering real nymphs, though.

A further series of nymph cards was designed for Tuck by William Stephen Coleman in 1908-09, although it was titled ‘Sweet Childhood.’ Water Lilies shows a small naked girl wading in a pool, using a lily pad as a parasol and brandishing a handful of blooms; Water Nymph depicts another young girl up to her thighs in a pool or stream, flowers also adorning her as she watches a goldfish swimming in the water.

William Stephen Coleman, Water Lilies

The nymphs created by Coleman are very obviously children rather than the young women of the Idylls and Nymphs series. It’s harder to judge too whether they’re intended to be real or not; the series title (Sweet Childhood) plainly implies that these are real girls and the entire set of naked nymphets certainly coincides with Coleman’s late Victorian tendency to equate youth with Edenic, uncorrupted innocence. By way of contrast, the attendant, flying cupids of the other series make it quite clear that we’re in a mythical world. Coleman’s girls might be real kids enjoying carefree play in the natural world, and the title of ‘water nymph’ might be merely metaphorical. It has to be admitted that the card titles probably came from the publisher- and that Raphael Tuck also issued ‘Little Sea Nymphs,’ two girls playing in the surf ‘At Rottingdean’ (from the ‘Little Folks at the Seaside’ series, no.2, 1911); ‘A Sea Nymph’- a painting of a young woman in a bathing costume (1918); a set of nine ‘Sea Nymphs,’ who are two young women photographed pretending to swim in the sea; ‘A Sea Sprite’ and ‘The Nymph’s Toilet’- two tinted photos from the ‘Time & Tide’ series showing a young woman in a swimming costume (1912) and- for the German market- ‘Strandnixe’ (Sea Nymph) a delightful painting by Herman Seeger of a girl in a red swimming costume sitting in the sea. Their swim suits and locations make it abundantly clear that these girls are ‘nymphs’ only in a romantic sense.

None of the other sea nymph cards show nymphs at all, therefore. Nevertheless, I’m still inclined to see the Coleman figures as minor nature divinities (he also painted ‘A Naiad‘). The subjects are seen at one with their environment: the pair are limniads or naiads, in other words. They exist isolated from the human world (for example, the absence of clothes and any attendant adults), acting as the spirits of the pools or streams that they are shown inhabiting.

Coleman, Water Nymph

In all these examples, though, the cards portray a benign, harmless world- a sort of endless, lazy summer idyll in Arcadia. The absence of potential tragedy and threat, which is so real in authentic classical myths, makes these cards ideal for greetings and for Valentine’s Day and suitable for purchase by all age-groups.

For more information on Pan and the satyrs, see my book The Great God Pan. To discover more about the nymphs, see my titles on the subject, such as The Woods Are Filled with Gods, published through Amazon/KDP or visit my Nymphology blog on WordPress.

Pan- from fertility to porn?

from Franz Naager, Liebesfreude (The Joys of Love), 1920

In a large number of previous posts, I’ve detailed how the god Pan is linked with sexual activity, most often with nymphs. I’ve also highlighted a couple of instances in which this aspect of his character was taken up specifically by modern artists, giving greater emphasis to his lewd– even slightly fetishistic– traits.

In this posting, I want to examine how Pan was portrayed in late nineteenth and early twentieth century erotic art. This genre of illustration very clearly put pornographic themes to the fore and Pan, in many respects, will have seemed like an ideal subject. Analysing the publications (illustrated books, cartoons and portfolios of drawings), there appear to be three broad ways of depicting the goaty god:

• in a classical context, making reference to other myths, divinities and mythical beings;
• as a figure who is typically to be found chasing, molesting or copulating with females; and,
• as a specifically priapic male, exaggerating this aspect of his character (and physique)…

I have so far rather loosely referred to Pan, but it is more correct to state that I’ve considered here any depiction of a faun, satyr or aegipan. Sometimes, it may be a little difficult to tell if an artist meant to draw a devil/ demon or a satyr; I’ve tried to dismiss those illustrations where the being’s tail is long and pointed and the legs aren’t hairy and hooved. It’s not always entirely clear though- horns on the head, as I’ve mentioned before- are not always decisive.

The most conventional representations are those which aim to place Pan in some sort of traditional, Greek context. Examples include Amadeus Dier’s 1925 collection, Et Eros, which features many sexual scenes from Greek myth, including a faun giving oral sex to a female; just as provocative is Friederich Wilhelm Kleuken’s set of Twelve Etchings from 1925, a series of classical scenes including Atlas shown as a faun, balancing the world, not on his shoulders, but on his sturdy member; a herm, a priapic faun and another who is flexible enough to be able to pleasure himself.

Some publications suggest that they may make more use of mythology than turns out to be the case. One example is Andre Collet’s Ode a Priape, of 1927, which depicts fauns having sex with girls as well as a girl in the act of copulating with a herm- a priapic statute often erected (as we might say) in gardens. Secondly, Hungarian artist Attila Sassy’s A Szatir Almai (A Satyr’s Dream, 1912) is really just an excuse to produce a wealth of pornographic scenarios. Satyrs seem to have some pretty vivid and transgressive dreams, judging by Sassy’s work: we see Leda and the swan, quite a few fauns coupling with women (but also with a centauress and with a goat) and a herm scene, but we also have a centaur and a woman, quite a few lesbian couples and some bestiality. Trans-species sex seems rather popular (see Antoni Uniechowski’s watercolour of a centaur and a woman or Albert Hendschel’s sketch of a faun and a goat- a common classical pairing). Rather similar are Kurt Meyer-Eberhardt’s Ten Erotic Etchings which were published in 1920. Once more, we see a faun with a centauress, a priapic faun with a woman balanced on his mighty Atlas-like member and- again- a fair bit of bestiality (which was apparently quite a good seller during the period). We are, though, drifting away from the classical sources into the second and third categories of my earlier list.

As we’ve seen, an emphasis upon the well-endowed state of the Great God Pan was not uncommon. Other examples appear in Jean Morisot’s Douze Images of 1930 and Luc Lafnet’s Caprices du sexe (1928), in both of which the god’s manliness is so exaggerated that we might say that the woman pictured is pole-dancing. This has ancient Greek and Roman roots, to be sure, but its reappearance in more modern images seems to reflect a reinterpretation of Pan for contemporary needs. His monster appendage is no longer a symbol of good luck, but is more clearly carnal and pornographic. Partly this trend is part of the rise of explicit images in our society; partly, too, I suspect, it is related to the adoption and revision of Pan as a kind of gay icon.

Georges Pavis, “She’s stolen my satyr!”

Lastly, we have the biggest category of images, those of Pan and his satyrs as chasers and seducers of women and nymphs. Once again, I regard this as a development of his older, classical role: for the Greeks, Pan represented the vigour and fecundity of nature, and his copulating with nymphs was a symbolic combination of a male figure with minor divinities representing vegetation, water sources, clouds and such like. In the modern manifestations, though, it’s about sex for sex’s sake: physical pleasure and sexual liberation. Hence, Louis Icart’s Les amusements d’un faune (1925) comprises 38 plates showing fauns having sex in a variety of positions and ways with one or two women. This collection is, frankly, overkill; even when Icart adds a few sex toys for the women to use on each other, it still gets rather monotonous and repetitive (as, perhaps, a lot of porn can). All of these scenes take place outdoors- something that’s inherited from those classical origins- and, in fact, rural and sylvan settings are standard. See T. Merten’s Confessions libertines (1937); Franz Naager’s Liebesfreude (1920), Jean Traynier’s Le tableau (1945) or Antoni Uniechowski’s Watercolours; Traynier, uniquely, includes a fauness actually copulating with a faun. On the whole, though, the pictures suggest that the female of the species must feel pretty hard done by.

Sometimes the satyr seems to be there simply to indicate that what you’re looking at is going to be racy: witness Gaston Smit’s Satyres et flagellants of 1932. The book’s cover shows a satyr trying to seduce a rather reluctant or shy looking naked woman. Inside, there are no more fauns, but plenty of BDSM. Similarly, Jean-Gabriel Domergue’s set of plates entitled L’apres midi d’une faune has very little to do with the ballet, but the mention of the faun seems to signal that there’ll be sex and nudity on display. Indeed, there is: there are lots of drawings of female nudes and lesbian couples, with just a few pictures of fauns coupling with women, out of a total of forty.

Herouard, “The goat-foot says: ‘Beaten on points! I should have known that she was Parisian'”

Another nod to the ancient mythology may be the occasional suggestion of sexual violence by the fauns, as in Jean Morisot’s Douze Images. Nonetheless, it’s intriguing to contrast these images to the satyrs and fauns that were drawn by French artist Cheri Herouard. Even though a lot of his output depicted lesbian bondage, in his illustrations for the periodical La Vie Parisienne, he generally gave quite a different, submissive view of Pan and his retinue. There is one cover showing a satyr spanking a young woman, but many more in which the balance of power is equal or even reversed. We see a faun and a girl chatting on a park bench, young women telling fauns off, a female hunter bandaging an injured faun’s foot and a satyr lifting a woman to help her pick some grapes. One illustration shows an older Pan with a young flapper, a nicely updated version of an older theme that I’ve mentioned before. The plate from La Vie illustrated above underlines this change between the parties: the French girl has worn out the satyr…

So, to summarise, Pan and the satyrs in the modern world are largely stripped of their classical meaning, the religious and environmental context that gave them more rounded characters and fuller significance. Instead, they are generally reduced to something of a common denominator: Pan as the god of nature and growth becomes Pan the god of fornication. This rather one dimensional approach to deity has preserved him in modern culture, but on rather diminished terms (although he has, of course, assumed a new environmental role as well, which also grew out of that same function as god of life and vegetation).

I have not reproduced most of the images described here, simply because they didn’t seem especially suitable for WordPress. You can, however, view them all on the Honest Erotica website.

The Goat Foot God- the mythological poetry of Leconte de Lisle

Bocklin, Play of the Nereids

I’m featuring the French poet Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle (1818-94) here because he’s little known to English-speaking readers and because his verse deals with many of the themes of the classical gods revived that I have discussed on this blog in the past.

Leconte de Lisle was one of the so-called Parnassian poets, named after the poetry journal, Le Parnasse contemporain, which was itself named after Mount Parnassus, the home of the muses in Greek mythology. Other writers whose work was published included Théodore de Banville, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and José María de Heredia. The group were associated with Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier, and espoused his idea of ‘art for art’s sake.’ They are seen as forerunners of the subsequent aesthetic and symbolist movements (in poetry and in visual art), about which I’ve written before.

Leconte de Lisle is noted for his classically inspired verse, which deals with many of the deities and heroes of Greek mythology. He is known for three collections of poetry, the first of which was titled Poèmes antiques (1852), and he also translated of Greek authors such as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. In his work he sought to give new life and meaning to stories of the ancient divinities, as well making ancient writers accessible to modern audiences- something which Pierre Louys also did, in his own way (and he was an admirer of Leconte).

It is primarily the ‘Antique Poems’ that will concern us here. We’ll start with Pan, a verse that captures all the essential qualities of this deity:

“Pan of Arcadia, with goat’s feet, with a forehead armed
With two horns, noisy, and loved by shepherds,
Fills the green reeds with amorous breath.
As soon as dawn has gilded the mountains and the plain,
Vagabond, he likes the games, the dancing choirs
Of the Nymphs, on the moss and the budding lawns.
The skin of the lynx covers his back; his head is bound
With the rustic saffron, the soft hyacinth;
And with a sonorous laugh he awakens the woods.
The barefoot Nymphs hasten to his voice,
And light, near the limpid fountains,
They surround Pan with their rapid rounds.
In the caves of vine branches, in the hollow of cool caverns,
Along the streams of running water escaped from the forests,
Under the thick dome of thick oaks,
The God flees from the radiant ardor of midday.

He is falling asleep; and the woods, respecting his sleep,
Guard the divine Pan from the arrows of the Sun.
But as soon as the night, calm and surrounded by stars,
Spreads the long folds of its veils to the mute skies,
Pan, with inflamed love, in the familiar woods
Pursues the wandering virgin in the shade of the thickets,
Seizes her in passing, and, transported with joy,
In the moonlight, he carries off his prey.”

The goaty god also features in Symphony: a goatherd is encouraged to play his flute in the woods during the heat of midday- “

“Near the rock whose moss has greened the walls,
From where [the nymph] Naïs listens to us, a white finger on her lip,
Let’s prevent Pan from sleeping with two goat’s feet.”

Pan and his constant companions, the nymphs, also appear together in The Source. Once more, it is noon and the sun is at its hottest and “Under the luminous canopy of rested leaves/ Sleep the lazy Sylvans.” Meanwhile-

“… the white Naïs in the sacred spring
Softly closes her beautiful eyes;
She dreams, asleep; a harmonious laugh
floats over her purple mouth.

No sparkling eye of a lover’s desire
Has seen under these limpid veils
The Nymph with the body of snow, with long flowing hair
Sleeping on the silvery sand.

And no one has contemplated the adolescent cheek,
The ivory of the collar, or the brilliance
Of the young breast, the delicately contoured shoulder,
White arms, innocent lips.

But the lascivious Aegipan, on the next branch,
Half-opens the thick foliage
And sees, all entwined with a wet caress,
This supple body shining under the water.

Immediately he laughed with pleasure in his inhuman joy;
His laugh moves the cool reduced;
And the Virgin wakes up, and, turning pale at the noise,
Disappears like a vain shadow.

Like the Naiad, in this remote wood,
Sleeping under the diaphanous wave,
Always flee the impure eye and the hand of the profane,
Light of the soul, oh Beauty!”

John William Waterhouse, Study for the Head of a Naiad, 1892

The poet tackles the age-old theme of the beauty of the nymphs, and the lust of the satyrs and pans, but he does so in fresh and vivid terms. In fact, nymphs feature extensively in Leconte’s work, such as the Hydriades of Hylas and the Aeolids, the “winged-footed” nymphs of the winds. In Thestylis, the naiads or water nymphs are seen:

“Emerging from the green reeds, the Nymphs of the marshes,
Their breasts still damp, surrounded by flowering grasses,
Their arms intertwined, dance in the meadows.”

The nereids– nymphs of the ocean- are encountered in Niobe:

“The beautiful-eyed Nymphs, inhabitants of the waters,
Have crowned their foreheads with seaweed and reeds,
And, springing from the bosom of the caves of Nérée,
Follow the beautiful Inô, venerated companion.
Like snowy swans on the seas,
They swim! The waves calm down under their play…”

In Khiron too we hear of “The Dryads piercing the fragile bark” and (of course) “The Satyrs watching over the bare-breasted Nymphs…” Similarly obsessed was the cyclops, who fell for the nymph Galatea, she “whose cheek and breast/ Are firm and shiny like the green grape.” In the ‘Anacreontic Ode’ The Rose, addressed to Aphrodite, we learn that, like her sacred flower, “The mouth and breast of the Nymphs are pink!” The goddess is also the subject of two poems, The Resurrection of Adonis and the Return of Adonis, both of which celebrate in sensuous terms the rejoicing at the rebirth of the divinity’s lover.

Leconte de Lisle covers other subjects I’ve touched on, such as centaurs (found in The Centaur’s Robe and Khiron) and Dionysos and his maddened, murderous maenads (Death of Pentheus). In contrast to this, though, the ode to Lydia presents a more benign aspect of the young god, as the deity of the vine and wine:

“Let’s drink, there’s still time, let’s hurry!
Your liquor, O Bacchus, of gloomy sorrows
Is the sweetest remedy.”

We hear, in Kybele of Silenus, addressed as “Silenus of Nyse, O inhuman Bacchante/ Shake howling, drunk, tumultuous/ The thyrses entwined with tortuous serpents.”

We meet too the chimera in the Supreme Kiss, the strange erotic combination of lust and death:

“Happy who, possessing the eternal Chimera,
Delivers a bleeding heart to the divine Monster,
And savours, the better to annihilate himself in it,
The ecstasy of death and voluptuousness
In the flash of a kiss that is worth eternity!”

Gustave Dore

In The Last God, Leconte- just like Oscar Wilde– mourned the death and passing of the Olympians. Despite the immediacy and vividness with which he invoked them in so many dedicated poems, he expressed a sense of loss and bereavement. The ancient gods were:

“Majestic and beautiful… august image
Of the Olympian kings, children of the golden centuries,
Rise up, such as at the time when the still happy Man
Greeted their altars with a free and proud homage.”

He is sadly aware, though, of the unavoidable truth:

“And I knew, frozen on the barren earth,
That it was there, rigid, asleep without return,
The last, dearest of the Gods, the ancient Love,
By whom everything lives, without whom everything dies, Man and the world.”

Lastly, a change of supernatural being, in Elves, a brooding macabre fairy tale that bears a strong resemblance to John Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci:

“Crowned with thyme and marjoram,
The joyful Elves dance on the plain.

From the path of the familiar deer woods,
On a black horse, comes a knight.
Its golden spur shines in the dark night;
And, when he crosses a ray of the moon,
One sees resplendent, with a changing reflection,
On his hair a silver helmet.

Crowned with thyme and marjoram,
The joyful Elves dance on the plain.

They all surround it with a light swarm
Which in the mute air seems to hover.
– ‘Bold knight, by the serene night,
Where are you going so late?’ said the young Queen.
‘Evil spirits haunt the forests;
Come and dance on the fresh grass instead.’

Crowned with thyme and marjoram,
The joyous Elves dance on the plain.

‘No! my sweet-eyed bride
is waiting for me, and tomorrow we will be married.
Let me pass, Elves of the meadows,
Who tread the flowering mosses;
Don’t delay me far from my love,
For here are already the glimmers of day. ‘

Crowned with thyme and marjoram,
The joyous Elves dance on the plain.

‘Stay, knight. I will give you
The magic opal and the golden ring,
And, which is better than fame and fortune,
My dress spun in the moonlight.

‘No!’ he said. ‘Go then!’ And with her white finger
She touches the heart of the trembling warrior.

Crowned with thyme and marjoram,
The joyful Elves dance on the plain.

And under the spur the black horse departs.
He runs, he leaps and goes without delay;
But the knight shivers and bends over;
He sees a white form on the road
Which walks noiselessly and holds out its arms to him:
‘Elf, spirit, demon, don’t stop me!’

Crowned with thyme and marjoram,
The joyous Elves dance on the plain.

‘Don’t stop me, you obnoxious ghost!
I’m going to marry my sweet-eyed beauty.’
‘O my dear husband, the eternal tomb
Will be our wedding bed,’ she said.
‘I am dead!’ And he, seeing her thus,
Falls dead also from anguish and love.

Crowned with thyme and marjoram,
The joyful Elves dance on the plain.”

This posting, naturally, has only scratched the surface of Leconte de Lisle’s work. It’s the merest hint of his work and its breadth. Hopefully, some of you will be encouraged to read further: it can all be found on fr.wikisource or poesie.fr.

Go Wilde in the Country- Where Satyrs in Groves Are Absolutely Free

Oscar Wilde is one of the most important writers of modern verse making use of classical themes. Robert Graves, in the next generation of poets, explored the symbolic power of the ancient gods and goddesses, whilst Algernon Swinburne and Pierre Louys were very effective in recapturing the potency of the Greek and Roman myths for the people of those times. Wilde, however, was one of the few writers who was able to bring contemporary reality and relevance to the stories and figures of classical times. Aleister Crowley, once again in the succeeding generation, was another who felt the enduring vitality of the deities.

Much of Wilde’s poetic work drew upon ancient works and ideas. Here, I want to review how he reacted to the Great God Pan. His poem Santa Decca, written in the mid-1870s, sets out the views that he held for many years: that we are expected to believe that the Christian faith has displaced the old myths with its divine truth, but that Wilde had his doubts and fervently hoped that something of the ancient world and its magic might persist and might thrive again:

“The Gods are dead: no longer do we bring
To grey-eyed Pallas crowns of olive-leaves!
Demeter’s child no more hath tithe of sheaves,
And in the noon the careless shepherds sing,
For Pan is dead, and all the wantoning
By secret glade and devious haunt is o’er:
Young Hylas seeks the water-springs no more;
Great Pan is dead, and Mary’s son is King.

And yet-perchance in this sea tranced isle,
Chewing the bitter fruit of memory,
Some God lies hidden in the asphodel.
Ah Love! if such there be, then it were well
For us to fly his anger: nay, but see,
The leaves are stirring: let us watch awhile.”

Likewise, in Ravenna, composed in 1878, Wilde again expressed his wish that he could find divinity in the natural world (and this despite the fact, as we have just seen, that he fears Great Pan will be angry for his centuries of neglect):

“I wandered through the wood in wild delight…
O waving trees, O forest liberty!
Within your haunts at least a man is free,

And half forgets the weary world of strife:
The blood flows hotter, and a sense of life
Wakes i’ the quickening veins, while once again
The woods are filled with gods we fancied slain.
Long time I watched, and surely hoped to see
Some goat-foot Pan make merry minstrelsy
Amid the reeds! some startled Dryad-maid
In girlish flight! or lurking in the glade,
The soft brown limbs, the wanton treacherous face
Of woodland god!”

Wilde knows that patience and faith will be required but, even so, the sense is that the poet feels more connected to his physical self, and to the environment around him- more alive and intensely aware of his corporeal nature- through communion with the ancient gods, who were themselves expressions of the power of vegetal and animal life. He feels more in touch with the natural world and, by so doing, Pan and the nymphs become more immediate and real to him. They are tangibly present, not mere stories to read in books. In his 1890 poem, The Burden of Ithys, this contemporary proximity of the gods comes to the fore. Pan and his retinue are present in the countryside just outside Oxford:

“But sweeter far if silver-sandalled foot
Of some long-hidden God should ever tread
The Nuneham meadows, if with reeded flute
Pressed to his lips some Faun might raise his head
By the green water-flags, ah! sweet indeed…”

Wilde imagined Pan chasing the nymph Syrinx through “the reeds that fringe our winding Thames,” bringing “memories/ Of faun-loved Heliconian glades and blue nymph-haunted seas” and of “Oreads peeping through the leaves of silent moon-lit trees.” In the valleys of the nearby Cumner Hills, and in Bagley Wood, he believes that “Some Mænad girl with vine-leaves on her breast/ Will filch the beechnuts from the sleeping Pans” and that, beside the River Thames-

“the brown Satyrs in a jolly crew
Trample the loosestrife down along the shore,
And where their hornèd master sits in state
Bring strawberries and bloomy plums upon a wicker crate!”

Pan would “plash and paddle groping for some reed/ To lure from her blue cave that Naiad maid/ Who for such piping listens half in joy and half afraid.” That “wantoning” that Wilde alluded to in Santa Decca, the deity’s unashamed expression of his animal instincts, might be expressed again, just a short walk away from the heart of academia. Sadly, though, the poet realises that all these visions have been just a dream and that the realities of the present day are intruding- a rabbit gambols along the tow-path, he hears voices from a canal boat at Sandford lock and the bells of Oxford’s churches reach him, reminding him it’s time to return to his college.

The conclusion of the Burden of Ithys drags him back from reverie to real life, but Wilde’s fervent wish to be able to commune still with Pan continued into the next decade, as his poem Pan, a Double Villanelle (c.1893) demonstrates:

“O goat-foot God of Arcady!
This modern world is grey and old,
And what remains to us of thee?

No more the shepherd lads in glee
Throw apples at thy wattled fold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!

Nor through the laurels can one see
Thy soft brown limbs, thy beard of gold,
And what remains to us of thee?

And dull and dead our Thames would be,
For here the winds are chill and cold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!

Then keep the tomb of Helice,
Thine olive-woods, thy vine-clad wold,
And what remains to us of thee?

Though many an unsung elegy
Sleeps in the reeds our rivers hold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Ah, what remains to us of thee?

Ah, leave the hills of Arcady,
Thy satyrs and their wanton play,
This modern world hath need of thee.

No nymph or Faun indeed have we,
For Faun and nymph are old and grey,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!

This is the land where liberty
Lit grave-browed Milton on his way,
This modern world hath need of thee!

A land of ancient chivalry
Where gentle Sidney saw the day,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!

This fierce sea-lion of the sea,
This England lacks some stronger lay,
This modern world hath need of thee!

Then blow some trumpet loud and free,
And give thine oaten pipe away,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This modern world hath need of thee!”

The poem Pan is something of a reversion to the mixture of resigned realism and romantic hope that we saw in Santa Decca. He wanted to believe, but he was struggling to sustain this in his heart, rather than as just an intellectual and artistic exercise. Sadly, a roughly contemporary verse, Canzonet, suggests that sober doubts were winning out:

“I have no store
Of gryphon-guarded gold;
Now, as before,
Bare is the shepherd’s fold.
Rubies nor pearls
Have I to gem thy throat;
Yet woodland girls
Have loved the shepherd’s note.

Then pluck a reed
And bid me sing to thee,
For I would feed
Thine ears with melody,
Who art more fair
Than fairest fleur-de-lys,
More sweet and rare
Than sweetest ambergris.

What dost thou fear?
Young Hyacinth is slain,
Pan is not here,
And will not come again.
No hornèd Faun
Treads down the yellow leas,
No God at dawn
Steals through the olive trees.

Hylas is dead,
Nor will he e’er divine
Those little red
Rose-petalled lips of thine.
On the high hill
No ivory dryads play,
Silver and still
Sinks the sad autumn day.”

With a weary acceptance, Wilde reverts to the first stanza of Santa Decca: Pan is gone and Hylas is dead. Despite the vigour and the romance of the classical deities, Wilde proved unable to sustain his almost single-handed efforts to revive ancient pantheism. Perhaps it’s worthwhile contrasting this aesthetic aspiration to the experience and practice of Crowley. Within the communal structure of Thelema and integrated with a much wider magical and philosophical practice, he succeeded where Wilde did not. Crowley translated something that was, essentially, literary, artistic and solitary, into a pragmatic and shared experience. Io Pan!

Pan, satyrs and the nymphs

In previous postings I’ve examined how mythology and iconography has consistently represented Pan and his entourage of male satyrs as priapic older men. They are obsessed with sex with nymphs, chasing them relentlessly through the woods and glades of ancient Greece, and this despite the fact- regularly underlined in paintings- that the fauns and satyrs tend to be mature males- somewhat unfit and slowed by years of over-indulgence and wine. I’ve reposted here a short essay from my Nymphology blog in which I examine some of the links- and differences- between the classical myths and the faeries and pucks of British folk tradition.

Pan & Puck- myths and messages

Satyrs & Pans- age and alcohol…

Jacob Jordaens, Satyr Playing the Pipe, 1629

I have written numerous times about satyrs, fauns and Pans (and, for that matter, faunesses), but have not so far paused to highlight an interesting fact about the iconography of these beings. We tend to be used to heroes and divinities of myth as being young, healthy and beautiful, but the satyrs are different. Their mythology tends to describe them as older males, albeit still priapic in their natures, and one of their regular companions is the elderly and often inebriated Silenus. Satyrs, in fact, are often allowed considerable diversity; they don’t have to be in peak physical form, it seems.

Sex and wine are the two main preoccupations of satyrs, as is widely known. We have to admit, though, that these are an ill pairing- the ability to enjoy the former wanes the more the latter is indulged in. Wine, plus age, are the curses of the satyr, so that we often see them reduced to a gaggle of drunken old men, as in Hodges’ painting below, characters relying on each other for both physical and psychological support.

Charles Howard Hodges, Silenus & Three Satyrs

We see diversity constantly displayed, as at the head of the page with Jacob Jordaens’ figure. He leads an active, outdoor life, to be sure, but the artist doesn’t shy from representing the aging, sagging flesh and signs of a pot belly. The same is the case with his two much older satyr heads, seen below. Wrinkled skin, gnarled joints and white receding hair are honestly portrayed.

Jordaens, Head of a Satyr

Jordaens, Old Satyr with a Flute

All the imperfections of the mortal body can be excused and depicted when it comes to satyrs, it seems. We see the blissful, unashamed indulgence in greed of David de Haen’s figure, whilst Gerard van Honthorst’s loving pair remind us that, after all, you don’t have to be Adonis (or, apparently) have any teeth) to find a lover…

David de Haen, Satyr Drinking from Grapes

Gerard van Honthorst, Satyr & Nymph, 1623

The raddled flesh of the male satyrs could be matched by that of faunesses, as Tiepolo showed us. They are not a well-favoured race, on the whole, being every bit as goaty and hairy as we would expect. Add age and over-consumption of wine, and we must confront the truth that they day will come when their nymph chasing charms start to wane, leaving only thwarted desire. We get a sense of this in Sebastiano Ricci’s canvas, which shows a frustrated elderly satyr contemplating assaulting the sleeping goddess of love. It’s surely not wise, but the opportunity has presented itself and he can barely contain his lust.

Giovanni Batista Tiepolo, Satyress with Two Putti, 1740

Ricci, Venus & Satyr

Age may stand for decay and impotence, but it can also represent the wisdom of experience. This was the approach taken below by Peter Paul Rubens; his mature satyr retains a cheerful disposition, even when placed beside the memento mori of a semi-corrupted skull.

Rubens, Satyr

These honest portrayals of the physical realities of the mortal body were taken to their frankest extreme by Joel-Peter Witkin, who confronts us with a disabled satyr. The image may shock- even, perhaps, offend some- but its lineage can clearly be traced, as I’ve shown.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Satiro (Satyr)- Mexico, 1992

This posting expands on the subject matter covered in my 2021 book on the Great God Pan (Green Magic Publishing).