0.1 Afterword  (Page 13/25)

Henley implies here that Wilde flaunts his sexuality through the very physique of The Sphinx , despite retaining “enough for Mrs. Grundy and the suburbs.” Mrs. Grundy, a character in Thomas Morton's play Speed the Plough (1798), was by the mid-nineteenth century widely considered a personification of prudery and conventionalpropriety. But Henley’s judgments here are colored not merely by barely concealed homophobia: for by figuring Wilde’s “case” as that of the“bookie” or “fancy goods” trader, Henley also exposes Wilde’s artistic pretensions to the harsh light of “business,” reducing a work over which Wildeand Ricketts had labored for years to a carefully calculated, even crude, work of commerce. This was precisely the kind of reaction that Wilde had feared fromthe British press, and to a writer eager to be taken as a poet, not merely an author (to invoke the distinction made by Wilde in signing his contract), itmust have been especially disturbing. But in truth Henley’s review exposes fault lines at the heart not merely of Wilde’s work but of aesthetic art and writinggenerally; for as the critic Jonathan Freedman has observed, aesthetes such asWilde and Henry James participated in a market economy, particularly in “the commodification of art and literature wrought by such an economy,” even as theycritiqued or refused it through what Freedman terms their “professionalization of literary and artistic practice” (Freedman, xii). By some lights, The Sphinx seemed nothing more than a carefully- packaged commodity, designed to yield the maximum profit for its author andpublishers, even as it obscured its own commodity status behind the language of art, decoration, and poetry. Henley’s point was underscored a few months later by a short notice of the large-paper issue whichappeared, under the byline “Mr. Wilde’s `Expensive Book,’” in the American periodical Munsey’s Magazine : “While almost everybody is crying for cheap books, Mr. Oscar Wilde is sending out alament that it is impossible to buy an expensive book any more. So he has written one. It is called ‘The Sphinx,’ and it is a poem. Twenty five copiesonly have been printed, and they are sold, or are to be sold, for thirty dollars apiece. The book is illustrated by Mr. Charles Ricketts, and is, as a matter ofcourse, an ideal book from the printer's point of view.” After giving “a sample of Mr. Wilde's idea of an ‘expensive’ poem,” Munsey’s commented only “if anybody wants to give Mr. Wilde thirty dollars, this is an opportunity to do so. He is taking up acollection for current expenses” (“Oscar Wilde’s ‘Expensive Book,’” Munsey’s Magazine , Feb. 1895 [12:5], 551). Munsey’s was one of very few notices of The Sphinx to appear in America in Wilde’s lifetime.

Henley’s review typifies the generally hostile reception with which The Sphinx was met in the popular press in Britain. But a contrasting reaction can be detected in thepages of British art magazines, as Wilde had predicted. The most important voice in this respect is that of Gleeson White, one-time editor of The Studio , and later (before his early death in 1898), an important spokesman for illustration as an art form in its own right.Initially White contented himself merely with reproducing Ricketts’s cover design for The Sphinx in the course of a wide-ranging, illustrated, scholarly essay in which White held up Ricketts’scover designs generally as epitomizing the principles governing “The Artistic Decoration of Cloth Book-Covers.” This was not the first occasion on which White praised Ricketts’s work in print. See White“Decorative Illustration,” 182. But in 1896 White published an important essay-length study of Ricketts’s work in which he paved the way fortwentieth-century appreciations of Ricketts as one of the most important designers of the fin de siècle . Here White treated Ricketts’s visual designs for The Sphinx not as secondary or peripheral but as integral elements of the total book, not any the less expressive of “imagination” and “artistry” forRicketts’s self-conscious concern to adhere to decorative or “conventional” principles: