VI
Here I propose to go through a litany of some of my omissions. In essaying to depict the aspects of an age there is always this pitfall, omission, which ambuscades the adventurous spirit. For we who know so little even about ourselves—how can we, without grave impertinence, boldly say I wish to bring back to the mind of others an age dead and gone? Everything is so interwoven in life that it is, for example, an unwarranted arbitrariness to discuss the literature of this period without brooding on the black and white art of the time, or the canvases of its painters.
I have worried for some space over Aubrey Beardsley, but I have not spoken of men like Mr. S. H. Sime, whose work Beardsley so delighted in. Probably Sidney H. Sime’s work in The Butterfly, The Idler, Pick-me-Up, Eureka, etc., besides his book illustrations, is in some ways the most powerfully imaginative of the period. There has been a Beardsley craze, and most assuredly there will be one day a Sime craze, when collectors have focussed properly the marvellous suggestive power of this artist’s work. Unfortunately, scattered up and down old magazines, much of this work is, as it were, lost for the moment like Toulouse Lautrec’s drawings in papers like Le Rire. But when it is garnered up in a worthy book of drawings like the Beardsley books, the power of Sime’s work will be undoubted. Fortunately Sime is still amongst us, and occasionally a Dunsany book brings us fresh evidence of his genius.
Again, I have not alluded to Edgar Wilson’s bizarre and fascinating decorations of submarine life and Japonesque figures. Like Shannon, Ricketts, Raven Hill, and others, he received his early art education at the Lambeth School of Art. At the end of the eighties he began collecting Japanese prints long before Beardsley had left school. In fact, Edgar Wilson was one of the pioneers of the Japanese print in this country—a love for the strange which came over to England from France. A typical decorative design of Wilson’s[20] is ‘In the Depths of the Sea,’ representing an octopus rampant over a human skull, beneath which are two strange flat fish, and in the background a sunken old three-decker with quaintly carved stern and glorious prow. Pick-me-Up first used his work as it did that of many another young artist, and in its back files much of his best work can be found. For The Rambler he did different designs for each issue, which is probably the only redeeming feature about that early Harmsworth periodical. The Sketch, Cassell’s, Scribner’s, and above all The Idler and The Butterfly, are beautified among other papers by his exotic decorations.
[20] Edgar Wilson and his Work, by Arthur Lawrence, The Idler, July, 1899.
Once more I have not spoken at all of Miss Althea Gyles’s hectic visions which, in her illustrations for Wilde’s The Harlot’s House, probably reached the acme of the period’s realisation of the weird. She is of course really of the Irish symbolists, and not one of the nineties’ group at all; but, in her Wilde illustrations, she almost enters the same field as the men of the nineties. Her connection, too, with the firm of Smithers is another strong excuse for mentioning her work here. In The Dome both her drawings and poems appeared, while in the December number for 1898 there is a note on her symbolism by W. B. Yeats. In all her drawings the fancy that seems to have such free flight is in reality severely ordered by the designer’s symbolism. Sometimes it is merely intriguing, as in drawings like ‘The Rose of God,’ where a naked woman is spread-eagled against the clouds above a fleet of ships and walled city, while in other designs the symbolism is full of suggestive loveliness, as in ‘Noah’s Raven.’ ‘The Ark floats upon a grey sea under a grey sky, and the raven flutters above the sea. A sea nymph, whose slender swaying body drifting among the grey waters is a perfect symbol of the soul untouched by God or by passion, coils the fingers of one hand about his feet and offers him a ring, while her other hand holds a shining rose under the sea. Grotesque shapes of little fishes flit about the rose, and grotesque shapes of larger fishes swim hither and thither. Sea nymphs swim through the windows of a sunken town, and reach towards the rose hands covered with rings; and a vague twilight hangs over all.’ This is explained to represent the search of man for the fleshly beauty which is so full of illusions for us all, while the spiritual beauty is ever far away. To this kind of interpretative design Oscar Wilde’s swan song, The Harlot’s House, lends itself admirably, and Miss Gyles’s black and white work here becomes inspired to the standard of Beardsley’s and Sime’s best work. The shadow effects illustrating the stanzas,
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try and sing.