ABSTRACT
Not to be remarked is not to live; and we are all Strug-for-Lifers now. If Hughie went forth without his coat, and walked in Piccadilly, Ernie would take off his waistcoat, and do likewise; and Bobbie and Freddie would each of them go one better than Ernie; till in due course the police must interfere. It is thus with the New Style, or Fin-de-Siècle, Minor Poet. His ancestors were modest-after their kind; they wrote and they printed, being to the manner born; but all thewhile they knew that in the end the Twopenny Box was theirs until the crack of doom. Their latest-born is of less abject mould. He may despair of being read; but he will be remarked, or he will die. So he goes forth into the world, year after year, as MM. Ernie and Co., into ‘Piccadilly, that immortal street,’ still shedding something-some rag of style or sentiment, or decent manners-as he goes; and in the end one looks to see him without his gaskins (so to speak), marching to some literary Vine-street between two brutal literary ‘slops.’ Not yet-we haste to add-is this the fortune of the learned and enterprising author of The Sphinx. He has discarded certain lendings, it is true; but he has retained enough for Mrs. Grundy and the suburbs, and the fashion of that he has retained is so deliberately frantic, its hues are of so purposeful a violence, that his end is gained, and immediate conspicuousness assured. To put his case in a figure: You mark, in front of you, under a pea-green umbrella, in a magenta chlamys, fleshings of mauve, and a yellow turban, an antic thing, whose first effect is that of a very bedlamitish bookie. You approach the creature with a view to business-when lo! you are aware that it is
only Mr. Wilde’s last avatar after all! Then you note that he is trading in a novel sort of fancy goods; and, vouch-safing unto him that smile of amazed amusement which it has ever been his chief ambition to win, you proceed to the examination of his wares. And wonderful wares you find they are. What are they like? Conceive a largish quarto, bound in white and gold, and composed of some twenty leaves of fair, rough paper (many of them blank); ten designs by Mr. Charles Ricketts, all printed in a pale red-brown; thirteen initials by Mr. Charles Ricketts, all printed in a curious green; and eighty-five couplets by Mr. Oscar Wilde, all printed in small caps, and in decent black. Also, the distribution of these precious eighty-five is about as Fin-de-Siècle a business as you ever saw; for on one page there are as many as nine, and on another there are as few as one, and on another you shall count some five, and on another yet are four, or six, or two, as Providence hath willed. And the reason thereof let no man seek to know; for, if he do, the half of it shall not be told to him. This caution applies with equal force and pertinency to the couplets-they are really quatrains, as the staves of In Memoriam, but by a special stroke of art they are printed as something else-thus thoughtfully displayed. ‘In a dim corner of my room,’ the Poet starts,
Far longer than my fancy thinks, A beautiful and silent Sphinx Has watched me through the shifting gloom.
