3Most importantly, Pater’s essay is worth exploring for its literary qualities and for the adroitness and sophistication of its argument. It is a complex, rich and subtle piece of writing rather, than a ‘fantastically aesthetic’ product of a ‘cloying taste’ (Rawson 362), or a piece of ‘literary voyeurism’ (Jenkyns 225).

5Pater might assume that most of his audience, as students of Plato, would recognise references to that author and be aware of the connotations those references recalled. Given this, it is worth noting the long quotation with which (unusually for him) Pater begins ‘Lacedaemon’. In this extract from Plato’s Protagoras Socrates claims that the Spartans are superior to the rest of Greece in their grasp of philosophy. Students of Plato, such as Pater’s audience, would recall the position of Protagoras among Plato’s Dialogues. Unlike many of his later works Protagoras is not a discussion of abstruse questions of logic, epistemology or the theory and practice of government but, rather, a picturesque and dramatic presentation of personalities in collision. Discussion of ideas is flavoured with badinage as the amiable, well-paid and vain old sophist Protagoras, surrounded by his court of admirers, shows he is still sharp enough to hold Socrates to a draw in their battle of wits. Socrates’ praise of Spartan philosophical wisdom, like his obfuscatory ‘exposition’ of a poem by Simonides in the same dialogue, is partly tongue-in-cheek, meant to startle and provoke, while at the same time, having in it a grain of the serious. After this opening quotation, Pater draws attention to the complexities, nuance and ambiguity of Plato’s own attitude. In Socrates’ comments on Spartan philosophy ‘of course there is something . . . of the romance to which the genius of Plato readily inclined him’ (198). The term ‘romance’ obviously recalls other mixtures of comic exaggeration, fantasy and touches of truth in Plato’s writings, such as Aristophanes’ speech on love in The Symposium.

8In his second paragraph, Pater moves between three contrasting statements about ancient Sparta. He mentions Pausanias’ view that the Spartans ‘of all people’ (199) admired poetry least. Then he notices the claim (how seriously to be taken?) of the ‘Platonic Socrates’ that Lacedaemon had ‘more philosophy than anywhere else in the world’. Finally, he recalls the allegation that the Spartan nobles were denied knowledge of reading and writing ‘for their protection against the ‘effeminacies’ of culture’ (199). Our immediate response to this last allegation that if it is true, it is itself at once challenged. We are reminded of Plato’s plausible and intriguing argument presented through the mouth of Socrates, in Phaedrus, that the written word, ‘a treacherous assistant’ (199) to memory, is inferior to speech. The Lacedaemonians, ‘the people of memory pre-eminently’ were in that respect, perhaps superior.

9The way in which Pater calmly lays together a succession of inconsistent and contradictory views of ancient Sparta is typical of his intellectual method. He wishes to loosen the hold of preconceptions on the minds of his readers, to create a space or an atmosphere in which questions, becoming open, can really be discussed. The free play of the intellect is not an end in itself but the essential preliminary to convincing and worthwhile investigation. The determination not to foreclose a question has its own reward. Reached after the careful and sympathetic exploration of views with which one may differ, and the imaginative portrayal of alien ways of life, any final verdict will be, and seem to be, fair and convincing. Being and seeming are both important. Free and open investigation and a willingness to entertain diverse possibilities are the mark of the faithful scholar. At the same time, the demonstration of freedom and candour is a persuasive rhetorical device.

10In this connection, it is worth noting Pater’s attitude to the leading authority he uses in his picture of Sparta, Karl Ottfried Müller’s The Dorians. Published in 1824, Müller’s book is a product of German Romanticism. Writing under the influence of J. G. Herder and Friedrich Von Schlegel. Müller emphasised the Spartan love of beauty, a ‘beauty of proportion and form, not of superficial decoration’ which ‘turns man himself into a work of art’ (Rawson 323). In Müller’s view, Sparta grasped the truth that the state was not merely an institution for the defence of persons or property as ‘modern heresy holds’ but a ‘moral agent created by its components’. A state existing in such a way as a moral agent was only possible where ‘natural affinity binds a Volk’ (Rawson 323). This line of thought did not recommend itself to the Liberal historians who dominated Victorian thinking about ancient Greece (When Müller’s was translated into English in 1830, the translations ‘explicitly dissociated themselves from their author’s political views’ (Rawson 359).

11Pater then, is choosing a somewhat unfashionable, perhaps even suspect authority or at least one unfashionable and suspect earlier in the century. The terms he uses to describe Müller seem chosen to suggest a certain quizzical detachment from The Dorians. Müller’s book is ‘laborious’ (199). It has an ‘air of coldness’ yet is ‘passably romantic’. This last phrase sounds ironic, given the degree of Müller’s idealisation of Sparta and, for the same reason, one may suspect an undercurrent of mild amusement in Pater’s mention of Müller’s ‘quiet enthusiasm for his subject’ (200). These somewhat mixed signals about the source he is using indicate reservations and warn the reader that though Pater may find some of Müller’s ideas interesting, his interest is well this side idolatry. He is not following his source blindly or uncritically and would not wish his reader to do so either.

12One of the most interesting features of ‘Lacedaemon’ is the stress Pater lays, early in the essay, on the role of music in Sparta. He quotes Müller’s view that the ‘laws, hymns and the praises of illustrious men’ (200) were taught in Sparta’s ‘schools of music’, thus rendering writing unnecessary. He then mentions the role of music in Pythagoras’ philosophy and in Plato’s perfect city. From this (somewhat tenuous) evidence he makes a crucial leap to the notion of Lacedaemon as a type of aesthetic vision.

13Lacedaemonian ‘music’ was music ‘in the larger sense of the word’ (200). It included ‘elaborate movements of the voice, of musical instruments but was also ‘partly moral’. It both promoted and alleviated the harsh Spartan life.

17An examination of the spell Lacedaemon cast in ancient Greece and later clearly requires an exercise of imaginative sympathy. Here, as with many other topics, rejection and denunciation may be heartening to those of like mind, may serve to rally the troops, but they cannot gain access to the subject. In order to work a counter-spell, one must understand and do justice to the first enchantment.

18This Pater was particularly well-equipped to do since he recognised in aspects of Spartan culture, and notably in its ‘music’, qualities which appealed to his aesthetic sense and ideas partly resembling his own. ‘Lacedaemon’ is interesting as an early example of the recognition of the aesthetic appeal of what would later be called totalitarianism. (The notion that totalitarianism could have an aesthetic appeal may seem strange or even scandalous but in fact, totalitarian regimes are rarely completely explicable without allowing for such an attraction. Perhaps one of twentieth century’s most potent, though debased, versions of Spartan ‘music’ may have been Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.)

19After providing an undercurrent of reservation in his epigraph from Protagoras, the contradictory views of Spartan ‘philosophy’ he quotes, the mixed signals he gives about the value of his source and his preliminary notice of the heavy cost of Spartan culture and ‘music’, Pater proceeds to set up a narrative structure within his essay which shapes the way it is to be read. He posits ‘some contemporary student of The Republic’ (202), one of Plato’s pupils in the Athenian Academy who has been ‘stimulated’ by his master’s ‘unconcealed’ admiration for Spartan life, yet suspects some ‘humour or irony’ in the philosopher’s attitude. This young man is ‘at pains to journey’ to Sparta and see for himself. This narrative device distances Pater and his readers somewhat from the object under discussion. The picture, we are being offered is not necessarily Pater’s own view of Lacedaemon and we his readers are to be less than wholly involved with what we are shown. The observer is a young intellectual, fairly naïve in the way he apprehends Sparta. This young Platonic student is, besides, the product of a highly civilised, articulate and intellectually curious culture, a companion of Charmides or Alcibiades. As such, he is possibly willing to endow Sparta with qualities it does not possess. The idealisation of wholesome, traditional organic communities (or those perceived as such) is a common enough pastime of intellectual traffickers.

20This narrative device makes it clear that ‘Lacedaemon’ is concerned not to day-dream about or to glorify Sparta but to examine the way in which its image was refracted through the minds of idealizing observers. The relatively few critical accounts of Pater’s essay have emphasised its supposed racist elements (the Spartans as upright Dorians compared to the marine and fluid temper of the Ionians and so forth). In fact, this supposed racism, however much the least hint of it may understandably jar upon our temper, amounts to no more than marginal and tangential references by Pater to a common stock of historical theories generally accepted at the time. Rather than racial history, ‘Lacedaemon’s’ chief concern is the diffusion and refraction of a political ideal, the way in which often sparse facts pass through the medium of intellectual culture, political theorizing, religious impulse and conservative nostalgia.

21Pater makes a crucial point that Platonic political theorizing was more plausible as a political programme than it might at first appear. It represented a ‘reassertion’ (201) of older, partially buried elements in Greek life in order that these might be the vehicle of ‘certain practicable changes to be enforced in the old schools’ (201). The resulting ‘reformed music’ would ‘float thence’ under the ‘shadow of its old religion, its old memories, the old names of things’.

22There is an intriguing similarity between this version of the Platonic political and social programme and the changes in Victorian, upper-class education after the 1840’s. Following the work of Thomas Arnold of Rugby and his imitators, new changes were enforced in old schools and a reformed music did indeed float forth under the old names of things. The strenuous prefectorial discipline, organised games, the careful drill and regulation, and earnest moral atmosphere, which almost all of Pater’s first audience must have experienced were little more than forty years old when he spoke. However, associated as they were, with old buildings, old religion and old names of things, they had already acquired a hallowed air.

23These comments introduce the connection, made throughout ‘Lacedaemon’ between the spirit of Sparta and that of the English public schools. This first reference suggests that the connection is more than a casual or incidental one. It is also a connection very different from the sentimental nostalgia some critics have attributed to Pater. He is interested in the way in which old forms can be imbued with new ideas and a new system set up using old memories and old names.

24It is essential to Pater’s purpose to remind his reader of disparities between Lacedaemon and the idea which others entertain of it as a place, or a culture. He is concerned as much, or more, with the dream of Sparta and with the nature of its appeal as with its actual life. For example, he remarks that his imaginary Platonic scholar or ‘youthful Anarcharsis’ (202) would have found it hard to get into Lacedaemon since its inhabitants on ‘a point of system’ (202) were ‘suspicious of foreigners’. The very name Anacharsis is a slightly unsettling joke. According to Herodotus, Anacharsis the Scythian left his barbarous land in the north in order to learn the customs of civilised nations. Welcomed in cosmopolitan Athens, he discussed politics with the sage Solon but, returning to Scythia with his new, exciting and sophisticated ideas was killed by the King for interfering with the traditional codes of his people. The reference reminds the reader that the ‘Platonic student’ is engaged in a counter-quest, a journey from a more to a less sophisticated society. It shows a gentle doubt about the motives and results of his journey.

25The two sentences which follow epitomise some of the subtlety both of Pater’s prose technique and of his handling of ideas. The conversational, almost slangy tone of the first sentence (‘Romantic dealers in political theory at Athens were safe in saying pretty much what they pleased about its domestic doings’ [203]) suggests that a man-in-the-street cynicism might be one (perhaps valid) response to the idealization of Sparta by Athenian intellectuals. ‘Still’, the first word of the long complex sentence which comes next offers to jerk us out of this casual dismissiveness. It is followed by a flow of past participles (‘made . . . solidified . . . fortified) suggesting Sparta’s actuality and strength and of phrases (‘constancy of character . . . heroic deeds . . . persistent hold’ [203]) asserting its moral value. This strength and value are contrasted with the nugatory theorizing of Athenian intellectuals (‘movements of an abstract argument . . . mere strokes of a philosophic pen’). However, at this point Spartan solidity and actuality begin to thin as we are referred, not to the facts of life in the city-state but to the legends of its divine origin in the remote past. The Spartan system might have ‘come ready-made from some half-divine Lycurgus or through him from Apollo himself, creator of that music of which it was an example’ (203). This movement from the concrete to the somewhat vague is repeated in two contrasting phrases at the end of the sentence. Sparta is a visible centre of actual human life’ yet at the same time, it was only ‘alleged to have come’ close to social perfection. The effect of the contrasts of register between the two sentences and of the movement between concreteness and relative haziness in the second sentence is to enforce upon the reader a simultaneous sense of the claims made for Sparta and of doubt about those claims. Here is something which at once appears solid and yet may perhaps dissolve when it is examined.

26Pater follows this hint of a double awareness of Spartan life, with a selection among, and deliberate contrast between, disparate facts which might easily supply evidence for attackers or defenders of Sparta. Lacedaemon was a ‘land of slavery’ (203) yet its slaves enjoyed ‘that kind of well-being’ which comes from ‘order and regularity’. Paying a ‘heavy tribute’ of agricultural produce to their masters, they were left to themselves on a day-to-day basis and ‘seldom visited’ (204). Their ‘old fashioned country life’ had its consolations, such as a ‘more boisterous plebeian mirth’ than their stern rulers allowed themselves.

27Pater does not permit himself or his readers to reach premature conclusions about an ancient and alien culture. Far from disguising or glossing over conflicts in the evidence, he positively insists upon them. Lacedaemon was a healthy, old-fashioned country society, whose lower-classes physically ‘throve’ under a ‘wholesome mode of life’ (205) and whose ‘young lords’ enjoyed ‘long hunting expeditions’. At the same time, it was a dark sinister place maintained by acts of selective terrorism which ‘made one shudder even in broad daylight’ (205). The description of the Spartan culling of slaves throws together the healthy, old-world, country-life of Lacedaemon (‘good Achaean blood . . . wholesome mode of life . . . too tall, too handsome or too fruitful a father . . . a sort of slavery which made him strong and beautiful’) with something mean, calculating and ruthless in the determination of the elite to hold onto power (‘came by night secretly . . . a state crafty as it was determined . . . murder them at home . . . one here or there’). One impression does not dominate another nor are they reconciled.

28Pater encourages a detached view of the Spartan way of life, presenting its beauty, self-sacrifice, discipline, its organic connection with its own past and its ancient rituals but also its darkness and cruelty. The chief impression is one of otherness.

29Several times, the movement of Pater’s prose seems to lure readers into a premature judgement and then to surprise them with an unexpected fact. Sparta, he remarks, was ‘in theory’ a place where power and privilege belonged exclusively to the old’ (205). In fact, the city was a place of ‘opportunity also for youth’. Pater stresses the point by repeating the words ‘youth’ and ‘youthful’. The implication is that, whatever the ‘theory’ may have been the young were free of the dominance of their elders. However, the result was not greater freedom but a more stringent control of the young by themselves. The initial sense of wider scope (‘opportunity . . . command, by serving . . . youthful courage, youthful self-respect’) ends in the picture of a system where individuality has been erased (‘true youthful docility . . . youth committing itself absolutely, soul and body, to a corporate sentiment in its very sports’ (206).

30His description of Sparta’s physical setting offers another example of Pater’s art of contrast and surprise. Oxymoron (‘this land of noble slavery’) and paradox (‘so peacefully occupied but for those irregular nocturnal terrors’) suggest tensions which then appear to be reconciled. Lacedaemon’s ‘luxurious lowland’ is ‘duly checked by the severity of its mountain barriers’. Its sternness moderates its ‘fullness’ like ‘sea-water infused into wine’ (207). Secure, it is ‘without walls of its own’. At the end of the paragraph, however, a carefully chosen image introduces a new note with different connotations. The fruitful tension or subtle balance of the Dorian state is questioned. Sparta was a ‘natural fastness, or trap or falcon’s nest’. The three alternative nouns enact a process by which the observer (and reader) scrutinize the object and discriminate first one, next another before arriving at a third and definitive impression. The final image of Sparta ‘the falcon of the land’ (207) watching over its subject hamlets, ‘kept in jealously enforced seclusion from one another’ (207) suggests tension enough but not a harmonious balancing of opposites. Rather, it is the strained watchfulness of a beautiful bird of prey.

31Instead of recounting well-known stories from Plutarch, Pater uses Pausanias’ catalogue of tourists’ sites imaginatively to evoke the atmosphere of ancient Sparta. In this evocation, he is concerned continually to encourage a free play of the mind on Lacedaemon themes. The ambivalence about Plato’s views and the degree of his seriousness, the use of the imagined ‘Platonic student’ as an observer, the calculated surprises and subtle dissonances of Pater’s style all encourage alertness and flexibility in the readers. They are being prepared for ‘Lacedaemon’s’ deeper theme and being made ready to receive some of the essay’s quietly subversive suggestions.

32Two preliminary points are worth making about this deeper theme, ‘Lacedaemon’s’ comparison of ancient Sparta with Victorian England. Firstly, Pater’s reversal of the common, and somewhat flattering, Victorian self-image of England as the analogue of Periclean Athens, a commercially prosperous, open, increasingly free society, is itself disturbing. In offering (uniquely among his contemporaries) to compare Britain to Sparta, he is implicitly raising questions his world might prefer to ignore. Secondly, the way in which he examines Sparta, emphasising its otherness and refusing either to ignore or to reconcile the discordant qualities of its life, its beauty and its horror, distances readers from their own society with which Sparta is being compared. Perhaps Victorian England (whatever it may wish to think) is not a central story or a secure point of vantage from which to view the world but, like Sparta, a strange place, both impressive and repellent, whose customs we may survey, like a dispassionate sociologist, noting both great achievements and the heavy price they exacted.

34However, one catches a hint of wry amusement which suggests that the writer’s attitude is one of less than total endorsement. Pater remarks that Sparta’s ‘picturesque and expressive irregularity’ (perhaps an analogue of the British constitution) was very useful for ‘hand-to-hand fighting’. The image of the majestic plane trees calming and protecting the people is prefaced by a moment of hesitation like that of a customer in a shop, over the right kind of tree to exercise this influence. ‘What trees? You wonder. The olive? The laurel, as if wrought in grandiose metal? The cypress? That came to a wonderful height in Dorian Crete: the oak? We think it very expressive of a strenuous national character’.

35This touch of gentle amusement, sufficient slightly to detach the writer and reader from an unquestioning sympathy with Lacedaemon, does not prevent a recognition of the beauty of the city and of its way of life where this can be justified. Beneath the ‘strenuous footsteps’ (212) of its present inhabitants lies layer upon layer’ of past histories, as ‘old poetic legend’ remains ‘in the depth of their seemingly so practical and prosaic souls’ (212) (This combination of the prosaic and romantic sounds like Dickens’s London). Pater’s Sparta has a market ‘full enough of business’ (215) and a population of workmen who possess ‘more than was usual elsewhere’ of that ‘sharpened intelligence and disciplined hand’ (215) and whose commodities were ‘much in demand’ for their ‘flawless adaptation to purpose’ (The description may recall Ruskin’s back-handed compliments to the flawless accuracy and finish of English machine-made goods). At the same time, young members of the Spartan upper-class are discouraged from involving themselves in trade or going into the market ‘like our own academic youth at Oxford’ (215).

36The connections between England and Sparta in ‘Lacedaemon’ are impossible to miss or to deny. The problem is Pater’s tone and intention in making the connection. Richard Jenkyns’s The Victorians and Ancient Greece suggests that ‘Pater’s Sparta is an England idealised’ (Jenkyns 223). Such a verdict, by an acute critic, illustrates one of the difficulties in discussing Pater’s style and the method by which he presents his arguments. Pater’s writing operates by adding layer upon layer of nuance, by making a suggestion and then correcting or modifying it by another. A final verdict is arrived at but only after the reader has been engaged in a full process of thought which does delicate justice to initially conflicting impressions. As a style, Pater’s is a superb medium for exploring complex questions in all their facets. Yet it is also peculiarly vulnerable to selective quotation by critics who may sometimes have preconceived notions about Pater’s attitudes. Ideally, his writing requires (as it most certainly deserves) an almost linear commentary.

38Pursuing the suggestion of gallantry, he reminds us that Spartan gentlemen did indeed use their abundant leisure to discipline themselves. ‘Their whole time free to be told out in austere schools’ (216). The juxtaposition of ‘free’ and ‘told out’ reminds us that they, like the Helots, were constrained by the exigencies of the system under which both lived. It would be somewhat mean-spirited (even if one had never heard of Leonidas, Agis or Cleomenes) to deny that such a regime of self-denial might not produce individuals of genuine nobility.

39However, Pater makes two important points about the relation of Helots to their ‘youthful lords’ (217). Firstly, (and following from the reference to ‘Gens Fleur-de-lisés’) he suggests that such a relationship belongs to another historical time, another culture and world of thought. Whatever its incidentally admirable features may have been, it is inconceivable as a serious option in the late nineteenth century. Pater reinforces this point by a reference to the Greek view of slavery, an immediate and unanswerable proof of the difference between the ancient world and those societies which followed the dominance of Christianity. The Helots’ ‘long easeful night, with more than enough to eat and drink’ were freely conceded to them by their masters since most of their contemporaries, like Plato and Aristotle, thought such ‘illiberal’ (216) pleasures appropriate to slaves and workmen. The examples of Helots’ devotion to their masters prove they possessed that ‘servile range of sentiment’ belonging to slavery which Aristotle (in this the spokesman of his age) thought was ‘one of the natural relationships between man and man’ (216–17). A world in which slavery was a ‘natural’ relationship could hardly have been intended as an ‘idealised’ or any sort of England. However, Pater is offering an extreme (but in some ways logical) development of the relation between the public school educated officer class and the ‘lower-orders’ of his own time.

40Secondly, Pater troubles this account of Helots and their masters with undercurrents suggesting that the admiration Spartiate aristocrats succeeded in arousing was not the whole story. These are ‘youth of gold, or gilded steel’ (216) Pater adds, in a significant afterthought. Their panache and fine manners cover an essential, and functional, hardness. Consider too, the implied contrast between surface and inner reality in the description of Helot loyalty: ‘There are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him’ (216). The effect of that last, quietly devastating, ‘trained perhaps to despise him’ is to question the whole basis of such a relationship, whatever ‘brilliant qualities’ and ‘touching submissiveness’ it may have involved.

41It is vital to notice the ripples of irony, the delicate dissonances and surprises which prevent Pater’s reader from assuming or giving any complete endorsement to the Spartan vision. Just when the readers are about to settle, to imagine the argument has concluded and the verdict has been reached Pater gently twitches the premature conclusion away, adding another suggestion or nuance of which we must take account.

42Consider the passage which opens his account of Spartan education. He begins with a firm reminder of the military exigencies Lacedaemon faced (‘fact of conquest . . . necessity of maintaining . . . position so strained . . . as Aristotle expressly pointed out . . . beleaguered encampment’ [217–18]). The language is imperative, admitting no denial either of the harsh situation it describes nor of the authority (Aristotle) it evokes. Then, subtly, the tone and vocabulary alter, introducing a note of aesthetic appeal (‘half-military, half-monastic spirit . . . so gravely beautiful place’ [218]). Pater then interrupts the flow of cumulative description of the Spartan ethos with demands for attention (‘But observe . . . there is the point!’) and a word, repeated and crucially modified (‘survived . . . survived as an end in itself’). Whatever the harsh necessity of its origin and the beauties of character and physique to which it gave rise, the main point about Spartan civilisation was that it existed as a self-justifying fact. A run of three phrases enacts the unpeeling of three layers of the Spartan ideal (‘a matter of sentiment, of public and perhaps still more, of personal pride’ [218]). The movement from sentiment, to public and then to personal pride (however fine it may have been) suggests that, ultimately, Spartan life was maintained because there were men proud of their own ability to bear the hardships involved in carrying it on. At this point, Pater offers his readers a gently subversive reminder, in one of his characteristic little gestures of deflation: ‘Pericles, as you remember, in his famous vindication of the Athenian system, makes his hearers understand that the ends of the Lacedaemonian people might have been attained with less self-sacrifice than theirs’ (218).

44Pater’s description of Lacedaemonian physical culture is introduced by a phrase (‘a spectacle, aesthetically, at least, very interesting’) which seems to place Spartan achievements in this field in a minor key. He is willing to concede (and such concessions are one of his rhetorical strategies) that Lacedaemonian gymnastic exercises produced the proportion and symmetry of the ‘most beautiful of all people, in Greece’ (218). What is striking, however, is the way in which Pater follows this praise of physical culture with an account of the emotional damage produced by the Spartan educational system. Although ‘all connexion between parents and children in those genial, retired houses’ (219) did not end in very early life, young Spartans, like English schoolboys leaving their own cosy homes, entered a ‘strictly public education’ with a very clearly defined programme, dominated by ‘ancient traditional and unwritten rules’ (219). An aristocratic education ‘for the few’, it aimed to instil qualities of leadership, making its products the lords, the masters of those they were meant by-and-by to rule’ (220). Those who underwent such training acquired a confidence, a ‘spiritual authority’ which dominated the ‘imagination’ of subject classes and peoples. It is hardly necessary to point out that this, whatever its value as a description of ancient Sparta, would be accepted as a clear and objective statement of the purpose and advantage of a Victorian English public school education.

45The obvious parallels, both fundamental and incidental, which Pater draws between Sparta and England in ‘Lacedaemon’ may well have been partly intended to familiarise a relatively unfamiliar subject for his first listeners. However, a far more important effect for Pater’s first audiences and readers would have been to defamiliarize their own lives and experiences and, perhaps, encourage a fresh look at them. It is when he touches on the emotional damage the Spartan system produced that Pater’s purpose becomes clearer: ‘If a certain love of reserve, of seclusion, characterised the Spartan citizen as such, it was perhaps the cicatrice of that wrench from a soft home into the imperative, inevitable gaze of his fellows, broad, searching minute, his regret for, his desire to regain, moral and mental even more than physical ease’ (221). The movement in this sentence from physical sensation (‘cicatrice . . . wrench . . . soft’) to the external public world of impersonal encounters (‘imperative, inevitable gaze . . . broad, searching minute’) enacts the violation it describes. Pater’s suggestion that the ancient Spartan noble (and by implication, modern English public-school boy) regretted and searched for a moral and emotional peace lost in childhood, is a good example of his art of leaving, sotto voce, a hint for the mind to work on.

46As his essay develops, Pater’s Spartan and English parallels grow more overt. Several are incidental but signal his intention to link the two cultures. Ancient Spartan expressions which ‘indicate an unflinching elaboration of the attitudes of youthful subordination’ (221) are what we might call their ‘public school slang’ (221–22). Like most of Pater’s first audience, his young Spartans were accustomed to the equivalent of cold showers (‘no warm baths allowed, a daily plunge in the river required’ [222]). More than these surface similarities, however, Pater is concerned with a deeper kinship, with the aesthetic qualities of the Spartan (and, by implication, English) systems which gave them their hold on the imagination both of rulers and ruled.

47He is careful to point out that, although the Lacedaemonians might have seemed ‘hard and practical’, they ‘lived nevertheless very much by imagination. Drawing an explicit comparison with English education of his day, he identifies the essential purpose of their training. It was ‘intended to preoccupy their minds with the past, as in our own classic or historic culture of youth’ (223). Instead of cultivating the inner life of individual satisfaction, as Pater himself had memorably urged in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, such private enjoyment was expressly banned (‘there would be no strictly selfish reading, writing or listening’ [223]). The Spartans satisfied their need for beauty in a corporate participation in ancient and picturesque rituals, acts of group memory and celebration, ‘archaic forms of religious worship’ (223) and reciting rolls of honour. The chanting at such ceremonies, Pater adds, ‘may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our old English schools’ (224). No doubt these occasions were moving, ‘one of the things in old Greece one would have liked best to see and hear’ (224).

48In quoting phrases out of context, or extracting one thread from his argument, we may exaggerate Pater’s identification with ancient Sparta and its modern analogues. As has been suggested, his method of understanding through appreciation involved loaning out considerable amounts of imaginative sympathy, entering, as far as might be possible, ‘into the thoughts and emotional lives of individuals, the moral and spiritual atmospheres of periods and societies. He seems to have felt that without such an effort at understanding, criticism, whatever smart points it might make, remained external to its object. However, nowhere in ‘Lacedaemon’ has the reader lacked warning signs, hints of gentle reservation, suggestions for second thoughts, touches of irony.

49The later pages of Pater’s essay alternate passages of praise for the particular beauties of this ancient culture, with others which subject it to deeper and more searching criticism. Finally in his conclusion, gravely and thoughtfully, Pater calls in the loan of sympathy he has made to Sparta (and to modern England) and gathering up all his whispered doubts and critical asides, voices a rejection all the more effective for its studied moderation.

51Pater describes the close friendship or male-bonding which were so significant a part of the ‘duty and discipline’ of ancient Sparta as well as being the ‘great solace and encouragement’ (231) of its warriors with the same show of sympathetic understanding. He clearly felt that ‘clean youthful friendship’ (231) was both admirable and valuable and in this, of course, shared a very common Victorian view. Given our own changed and highly sexualised attitudes to relationships we often find it difficult to distinguish such close friendships from overt homosexuality. In Pater’s case, there is the added problem that speculation about the nature of his own sexual inclination has become a major preoccupation (if not a staple) of criticism over the last two decades. As Richard Jenkyns remarks ‘we find it hard to describe the pleasures of friendship in the vigorous and enthusiastic language that came naturally to our ancestors’ (Jenkyns 287). Given this sensible comment, it is a pity to find the same author remarking of ‘Lacedaemon’ that Pater’s stance as a ‘middle-aged gentleman loitering at the edge of the playing fields is not altogether pleasing’ (Jenkyns 225). Such a remark is typical of a persistent suggestion that, in handling emotional topics, Pater deceived his readers and perhaps himself.

52For present purposes, it is unnecessary to add to the already copious speculative discussion about Pater’s sexual inclinations and the nature (if any) of their expression. Nor need we determine the quality of ancient Spartan friendships and the accuracy of Pater’s portrayal of them. The point at issue is whether in ‘Lacedaemon’ Pater does distinguish, between two sorts of relationship, ‘clean youthful friendship’ and homosexual love. Is he, as some would suggest, consciously or unconsciously, blurring the distinction between the two or using the former as a code or disguise for the latter? From internal evidence within the essay it is clear that Pater does indeed make such a distinction, which he expects his readers to understand. He remarks that ‘in the gymnasia of Lacedaemon no idle bystanders, no—well! Platonic loungers after truth or what not—were permitted’ (220). The tone is worldly-wise, mildly amused. The affected hesitating for the right word (‘no—well!’) and that final ‘what not’, implying that we need not pursue the subject, assumes a shared knowledge with the reader. Of course, we all know why some men hung around the gymnasia of Periclean Athens. Pater’s comment here makes against the notion of a self-deceiving or tricky writer seeking to blur distinctions. It provides support for the view that the description of Lacedaemonian (and by implication English public school), youthful friendship is meant to be taken at face value. Pater’s unaffected praise for this, as for other features of Lacedaemon, is part of the essay’s total effect, one aspect of its scrupulous assessment. Here, as with Spartan dancing, the system succeeded in harnessing instincts which in themselves, there is no need, and perhaps no excuse, to denigrate.

53Pater’s judiciousness and generosity make his final and definite withdrawal of sympathy all the more striking. He has been willing to describe, to sympathise with and even to celebrate many aspects of ancient Spartan life, while doubting or demurring and subtly nudging his reader to detachment. Throughout ‘Lacedaemon’ his parallels with the social and educational ethos of his own time have had that same undercurrent of doubt.

54Pater’s final rejection of Lacedaemon is made from religious grounds and within a religious framework. Given this, it is possible that its significance may have been overlooked. Evident as the serious religious interests of Pater’s later work are, critics have not generally given them much attention. The subject is unfashionable and, in any case, the apparently more subversive early Pater seems a more promising topic. This is unfortunate since Pater’s misgivings about Sparta and, by implication, contemporary England are interesting in themselves, besides suggesting that the common picture of a socially disengaged writer may need modification.

56Certainly, their ‘cheerful daylight’ religion provided the Spartans with no ultimate sense of meaning. Pater has his young Athenian asking the purpose in Sparta of ‘this strenuous task-work, day after day’. What was the point of such costly ‘loyalty to a system’ (232) and such laborious, endless submission of the individual to a process which demanded a sacrifice of so many of the ordinary pleasures of life and gave relatively little in return? In an interesting rhetorical device, Pater gives ‘an intelligent young Spartan’ the right of reply. He is represented as claiming that his country’s institutions ‘had a beauty in themselves’. Pater then explicitly link this claim to his own place and time (‘as we may observe of some at least of our own institutions’ [232]). The Spartan ethos relieved ‘the present by maintaining in it an ideal sense of the past’.

57In spite of these qualities, Pater suggests that the Spartan ideal grows thinner and more tenuous under examination. There is a sense of whistling in the dark in the Spartan’s answer (‘he had his friendships to solace him and to encourage him, the sense of honour’ [232]). ‘Solace’ and ‘encourage’ have more than a hint of pathos. Pater follows this exchange between Athenian and Spartan with a gently patronizing comment on the latter. ‘There was much of course in his answer’ (233). However, this little pat on the head is merely the prelude to a final firm rejection:

Yet still, after all, to understand, to be capable of, such motives was itself but a result of that exacting discipline of character, we are trying to account for, and the question still recurs, To what purpose? Why, with no prospect of Israel’s reward, are you as scrupulous, minute, self-taxing as he? (233)

58Calmly, but remorselessly, Pater underlines the inadequate nature of the argument for Spartan (and much English) upper-class training. They may have produced a social type capable of understanding ‘honour, friendship, loyalty to the ideal of the past, himself as a work of art’ (232–33). Yet, a social product, even with these admirable qualities, is not sufficiently justified as an end in itself. Why those qualities in particular and, even more, why achieve them at such a cost? A system of austerities and self-denial only makes sense in a religious context. St Paul’s questioning of the Greek athletes’ pursuit of a transitory crown was above all, the question of ‘a practical man’ (233). The same purely practical question might be asked of the Spartan training and of ways of life that resembled it. Reference to the Spartans as ‘monastic’ (233) provides an opportunity for a parting shot. Medieval ‘monastic severity’ was ‘for the purging of a troubled conscience’ or in ‘the hope of an immense prize’ (233). These conditions were not met in Sparta. The question of whether or not they were met in contemporary England is implied but left unanswered.