0.1 Afterword  (Page 10/25)

In the pictures I have striven to combine, consciously or unconsciously, those affinities in line workbroadcast in all epochs. My attempt there as elsewhere was to evolve what one might imagine as possible in one charmed moment or place, just as some greatItalian masters painted as they thought in the antique manner, studying like Piero della Francesca, for instance, to fulfill the conditions laid down byApelles, whom he had of course never seen, but had taken on trust (Ricketts, A Defence, 25).

But although Ricketts always regarded his pictures for The Sphinx as the best of all his illustrations, to the extent that later in life he produced a second unpublishedseries along similar lines, Wilde was disapproving, remarking cattily, “No, my dear Ricketts, your drawings are not of your best. You have seen them throughyour intellect, not your temperament” (quoted in Ricketts, Oscar Wilde: Recollections , 38). Corbett sees this remark as paradigmatic of the personal tensions between writer and artist, nearly always present in the creation ofeven the most successful literary illustrations (Corbett, 36). Paradoxically, Wilde required the visual artistry of Ricketts and Beardsley—and before them, ofWhistler—even as he privately disparaged these men or their work.

The second crucial feature introduced between 1892 and 1894 derives from Ricketts’s decision to print the entire poem, save for thewood-blocked initial letters of the 1894 edition, in roman capitals. Like the decision to print a familiar stanza form in couplet form, this decision not onlyadds to the air of estrangement and artifice by “defamiliarizing” Wilde’s language itself, but also turns each line into an iconic or monumental thing notunlike the sphinx itself. (Roman capitals, sometimes called “inscriptional capitals,” are so-called because of their survival on notable Roman monuments,such as Trajan’s Column in Rome, where their letter-forms inspired printers and typographers in the fifteenth century to invent “old” or “roman-face”typeforms.) As Ricketts himself later justified this decision, “I made an effort…towards a book marked by surviving classical traits, printing it inCapitals” (Ricketts, A Defence , 25).

By February 1893, the designs and text had evidently been submitted for printing, since Wilde wrote to Lane at this date eager “tohear how The Sphinx is progressing, and what date it is likely to come out on” ( Complete Letters , 545). (Four months later, Wilde referred to himself confidently, in a telegram to Ada Leverson, as “the author of The Sphinx ” [ Complete Letters , 568].) But upon returning corrected proofs to Ricketts,Wilde remarked, “Don’t you think the pages are terribly few in number ? Why not put fewer verses on each page ? We could easily have four or five pages more”( Complete Letters , 591). Holland and Hart-Davis, the editors of Wilde's correspondence, date this (undated) letter "Spring 1894." I follow Isobel Murray ("SomeProblems," 73) in regarding Spring 1893 as a more likely date. And in a letter speculatively dated June 1893 by its recent editors, Wilde expressed asudden concern to “make the whole poem longer” at the proof stages: “I return proof of The Sphinx ,” he wrote to Ricketts: “Will you kindly have a corrected proof copy sent to me, as I want tosee if I could make the whole poem longer. I do not know the name of the printers, or I would write to them direct” ( Complete Letters , 566). Shortly after this, Wilde composed and inserted lines 75-88 ( “The river horses in the slime…. his marble limbs made pale the moon andlent the day a larger light” ), arguably the most erotic and decadent lines inthe poem. The incorporation of these lines represents the third and final change made after 1892, Wilde having first drafted these lines in fragmentary form in anotebook that survives to this date (see Fong and Beckson, 306-7).