FEASTING WITH PANTHERS

by Rupert Croft-Cooke ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 1968

Culture,"" said Matthew Arnold, ""is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail."" Arnold, that high-minded Victorian: he thought Shelley and Byron geniuses, perhaps, but moral guides, never. And after Arnold came Swinburne and Symonds and Wilde. Swinburne had a thing about the flogging-block at Eton: he was a misty-eyed lush, impotent and masochistic, one of the first Englishmen to revel in Sade. Symonds had affairs with Venetian gondoliers and wrote about the Italian Renaissance. Wilde taught the upper classes how to be witty; he was rewarded with Reading Gaol. The last decades of Victoria's reign became the era of the double face. Respectable dons, heroic poets, straight-laced husbands--when the sun went down, the door closed, the amenities stopped, they could all be found doing something naughty or diabolic, imagining the Greek Ideal resurrected in some student or stable boy. Rupert Croft-Cooke writes about these matters in slightly schizoid fashion, too. In one breath he scoffs at the blue-noses, then or now, in the next he speaks blithely of his subjects as ""queers"" or ""queens."" These constant appellations make for passages of unintended comedy. Still, it suits his book, a heady, tone-deaf mixture of scholarship and conjecture, rehashing and revelations, energetically composed, and no doubt rewarding. One could dine out on a few of the tales here for months to come, especially the lesser known business re Lewis Carroll's Lolita penchant (so that's why he wrote Alice) or Lear's buddies. The thought of Arnold reading it is also worthwhile.

Pub Date: March 4, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION