Feasting with Panthers is an illuminating study of certain notorious and brilliant Victorians. The great flowering of decadent art toward the end of the nineteenth century has prompted Rupert Croft-Cooke to examine the lives and the works of the most famous and influential writers of that time - the men who made a cult out of their sexual idiosyncrasies, who created an aesthetic from their perversity, and who managed to initiate a revolution in morality that continues today.
Mr. Croft-Cooke deals with the period from 1857, the year of Swinburne's meeting with the Pre-Raphaelites at Oxford, to 1895, the year of Oscar Wilde's trials. The first section of the book is about Swinburne, a great poet but an impotent masochist obsessed with flagellation. The second revolves around John Addington Symonds, a celebrated historian and essayist who applied "Greek ideals" to his affairs with gondoliers and Swiss peasants. The third is concerned with Oscar Wilde - the man who bore the brunt of English society's outrage.
Feasting with Panthers also illuminates the private lives of such figures as Whitman, Lewis Carroll, Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, and a multitude of lesser-known but equally fascinating artists. The author has related the works of these late-Victorian writers to their social background, to public morality, the historical setting, and their sexual proclivities, enabling him to place the worth of their art in a new and more accurate perspective, and to examine the dimension of decadence as it undercut the fabric of manners and morals.
Quote: Wilde was at that time behaving with his usual indiscretion at Worthing where he and Bosie Douglas had picked up a newspaper boy named Alphonse Conway and two of his associates named Percy and Stephen. When Bosie left, Wilde wrote to him: “Percy left the day after you did. He spoke much of you. Alphonso is still in favour. He is my only companion, along with Stephen. Alphonso always alludes to you as ‘the Lord’, which however gives you, I think, a Biblical Hebraic dignity that gracious Greek boys should not have. He also says, from time to time, ‘Percy was the Lord’s favourite’, which makes me think of Percy as the infant Samuel—an inaccurate reminiscence, as Percy was Hellenic.”
Alphonse Conway leaves one with a happier impression than most of the young blackguards with whom Wilde associated. Wilde explained in court during the trial of Queensberry that he had met Conway when the boy and another had helped launch a boat for him and Bosie Douglas and they had taken him and his friend for a sail. From Wilde’s letter it would seem to have been a light-hearted seaside affair, and he said in evidence that Conway had become a great friend of his sons. Wilde bought him clothes and took him to Brighton for the week-end, then tried to get him a job on a ship. Great play was made by Carson of the fact that Conway sold newspapers at a kiosk on the pier. (“The first I’ve heard of his connection with literature,” said Wilde.) It was incredible to Carson and later to most of the jurymen that Wilde should have found this “happy bright boy”, a fit companion for his family when his occupation was selling newspapers. But although Queensberry’s solicitors had Conway in court during the trial of Queensberry, the prosecution did not produce him at Wilde’s trials. He may, like Mavor, have refused to testify according to the statement he had been induced to make. It would be pleasant to think so. A more cynical view is that Queensberry could bribe him whereas the Public Prosecutor could not.
Wilde was no less susceptible to Freddy’s vulgar but sprightly personality. One can see the tall dressy Irishman in his elegant frock-coat beaming down on the cheeky little street rat and indulgently promising to take him to Paris for a week-end as so many Englishmen in the last centuries have promised so many new acquaintances, female and sometimes male. Freddy had passed through Paris on his way to Cannes with Uncle Burton and wanted to see more of the exotic attractions which every young Englishman believed it to possess. They travelled on the “Club” train and went straight to an hotel at 21, Boulevard des Capucines where Wilde had discreetly engaged three rooms with communicating doors, for Schwabe was to join them on the following day. Next morning they lunched at the Café Julien and in the afternoon went to Pascal the famous hairdresser under the Grand Hotel where Wilde had once had his hair done in what he called a Neronian style.
