Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Book

Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the BookAuthor(s): MICHAEL BROOKSSource: Criticism, Vol. 12, No. 4 (fall 1970), pp. 301-315Published by: Wayne State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23098511 .

Accessed: 10/10/2013 04:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wayne State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 131.170.6.51 on Thu, 10 Oct 2013 04:47:52 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=wsupress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/23098511?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


MICHAEL BROOKS*

Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, a?id the Art of the Book

Although the name of the English artist and book designer Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) does not occur prominently in studies of Oscar

Wilde, the friendship between the two men exemplifies one of the most significant aspects of Wilde's career: the cross-fertilization be tween his literary work and the pictorial arts.1 The spiritual importance of decorative design was a principle that first found expression in his

early enthusiasm for the arts and crafts revival, then guided him during his lectures in America, and at last encouraged his interest in the art nouveau of the nineties. As he said in " The Critic as Artist

. . . the art that is frankly decorative is the one to live with. It is, of all our visible arts, the one art that creates in us both

mood and temperament. Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. The harmony that resides in the deli cate proportions of lines and masses becomes mirrored in the

mind. The repetitions of pattern give us rest. The marvels of design stir the imagination. In the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements of culture.2

Inevitably, a man holding these opinions would wish to match the

appearance of his books with their contents, and this desire transformed

Wilde's friendship with Ricketts into a working partnership. Wilde's interest in book design, however, preceded his acquaintance

with Ricketts. He knew at an early point in his career that his books would require a unique design, but little in Victorian book production,

* Michael Brooks has written on George Moore and on cast-iron architecture in New York City. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at New York

University. 1 There is no comprehensive study of Wilde's relation to the visual arts of his

time. Robert Schmutzler's Art Noveau (New York, n. d.) has many valuable comments on Wilde and a well-illustrated section on Ricketts. John Russell

Taylor's The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (Cambridge, 1966) also contains an

illuminating section on Ricketts. The only book that illustrates the full range of Ricketts' activities is Charles Ricketts, R.A., Sixty-Five Illustrations (London, 1933), with an introduction by Thomas Sturge Moore.

2 Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," Intentions (London, 1891), p. 196.

301



302 Michael Brooks

with its garish colours, cramped types, and florid decorations, seemed

appropriate. Morris' Kelmscott Press, which might have guided his

taste, was not founded until 1890. As a result, Wilde's patronage was

experimental, and he became a minor but still significant figure in the

development of modern book design. Poems (1881) was Wildes first attempt to commission a design

appropriate to his aesthetic ambitions. It discarded the gray wrappers with ruled borders and heavy, block printing of Ravenna (1878) in favour of white parchment covers decorated by a gilt floral design, but inside there was the same symmetrically arranged title page trying to impress by the number of type faces employed rather than by any distinction in their layout. Rennell Rodd's Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf (1882), for which Wilde arranged the printing in America and to which he contributed a long preface, was more daring. The edition de luxe had covers of white vellum, a non-symmetrical title page, and handmade parchment paper interleaved with thin sheets of pale apple green. The poems were printed in brown ink on one side of a sheet

only and the illustrations were, as Wilde wished them to be, reminiscent of a Japanese fan. Although he was delighted with the book, pro claiming it " a chef d'ceuvre of typography

" and " an era in American

printing,"3 Wilde must have soon realized that it impressed more by the variety of its features than by any particular harmony in their

design. The Happy Prince (1888) was simpler and more pleasing, and was designed by one of the pioneers in the decorative movement, Walter Crane. But it was not until 1889, when Wilde met Ricketts

and his close friend Charles Shannon (1863-1937), that the search for a compatible designer finally ended.

Although Ricketts' name may have been familiar to Wilde in his

capacity as editor of The Woman's World, where two of Ricketts' hackwork magazine illustrations had appeared during 1888, it was a

complimentary copy of the first issue of The Dial that led to their first meeting. An occasional periodical published with the sole purpose of advertising the talents of Ricketts, Shannon, and a few friends, The Dial aimed at innovation from the beginning. The cover was a wood

engraving of a deserted garden that, in theme, in wealth of natural detail, and in daintiness of finish, showed Ricketts' debt to the Pre

Raphaelite illustrators of the sixties. The vignettes inside showed him

extending this tradition into a fully conceived art noveau. One, clearly 8 Oscar Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London

1962), p. 124.



Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Book 303

indebted to Blake's plates of Jerusalem, shows an equivocal plant-flame shape whose wings, like the limbs of Blake's giant Albion, are decorated

by stars and the moon. Another vignette might be described as a decadent variation on the Ophelia theme: it shows a drowned girl floating in a river as visible odors from the water lilies rise in ornate curves about her. The same delight in ambiguous effects and over

ripe sophistication can be found in the literary contributions by Ricketts, Shannon, and John Gray. Indeed, the issue contains several adult fairy tales similar to those Wilde was writing at the time. Clearly the editors of The Dial would be two young men worth knowing.

When Wilde walked the short distance from his Tite Street home to Whistler's former house in the Vale, which Ricketts and Shannon were then renting, he entered a circle of young men who offered him an admiring audience and stimulating conversation. Ricketts and Shan

non, at the center of the circle, were twenty-three and twenty-six

respectively. Apprenticed to learn wood engraving just at the time when the craft was made obsolescent by the new line block process, they resolved to turn this misfortune to good account by treating their craft not as a mere technique for reproducing drawings in The Ladies'

Pictorial, but as a sophisticated art with a great tradition. While

waiting for fame to strike, the pair existed on a small income from Ricketts' grandfather and the profits from Ricketts' hackwork. Ricketts,

easily the dominant member of the pair, was an engaging host, and the two soon gathered about them a circle that included John Gray, " Michael Field "

(pseudonym of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Luciaen Pissaro, Reginald Savage, Thomas Sturge Moore, Laurence

Binyon, and William Rothenstein. Here Wilde could find discussions that revolved around Blake and Baudelaire, Wagner and Berlioz, Ros setti and Gustave Moreau. It was, he told a friend,

" the one house in

London where you will never be bored."4 It was not long before friendship began to expand into an artistic

partnership. The stodgy illustrations that Ricketts had contributed to The Woman's World in 1888 gave way to more exciting art nouveau

designs during 1889. During the same year Wilde suggested that Ricketts prepare a portrait of the mythical Willie Hughes in the style of Clouet and was so delighted with the result that he called upon the gods to shower gold and roses on the Vale. It was by encouraging his young friend to take up book design that Wilde made his most

4 Quoted in Charles Ricketts, Self-Portrait, ed. T. Sturge Moore (London,

1939), p. 16.



304 Michael Brooks

important contribution to Ricketts' career. He persuaded his pub lishers, Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., to let Ricketts try his hand at Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Helene Vacaresco's The Bard

of Dembovitza (1891). More important, he placed his own work in his friend's hands. With the important exception of Salome (1894), which John Lane insisted on giving to Beardsley, everything Wilde

published after 1889 passed through the hands of either Ricketts or Shannon. Ricketts could take credit for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Intentions (1891), Lord Arthur Scivile's Crime (1891), The House of Pomegranates (1891), John Lane's edition of Poems (1892), The Sphinx (1894), and the author's edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), while Shannon's designs gave visual uniformity to Wilde's four comedies. The results were so pleasing that in 1897 Wilde could

speak of Ricketts and Shannon—with pleasure if not quite literal

accuracy—as the friends " who decorated all my books for me."5

II

Wilde's best known reference to book design occurs when Dorian

Gray happens upon an unnamed yellow volume and is so fascinated

by its exquisite prose that he orders nine large-paper copies from Paris so that they might be bound in nine separate colours to match his

shifting moods. Dorian, of course, is merely imitating the more elaborate arrangement of his prototype, Huysmans' Due Jean des Esseintes who, horrified at seeing his favorite authors printed in the

ordinary way, had insisted on ordering specially hand-made papers and an appropriate type face for each volume. Since Wilde and Ricketts were fascinated by des Esseintes' life and by his passionate love for exquisitely wrought objects, it is appropriate that Ricketts'

designs for Wilde's books should so often carry an aroma of decadence and perversity. But it is only a stylistic effect that they derive from the French decadence. Their deeper roots are in Ruskin's insistence on the dignity of handicrafts, Pater's defense of the decorative element in art, Morris' stylization of natural motifs, and Whistler's enthusiastic

adaptations of the principles of Japanese design. Harmony was a key word for the English aesthetic movement, and

both Ricketts and Wilde were fascinated by the challenge of harmon

izing divergent elements into a single, fluid whole. For Wilde, at least, the ideal of decorative harmony had been most vividly achieved

6 The Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 621.




in Whistler's famous Peacock Room, with its use of stylized Japanese motifs and its treatment of painting, frame, wall, and furniture as part of a single integrated colour scheme. So fascinated was he by this achievement that he used Whistler's architect and sought Whistler's

advice in planning the decoration of his own Tite Street home. A house

provided an admirable challenge for those fascinated by harmony, for it contained so many elements to be blended. So did the book, with its page layout, its typography, it illustrations, its binding and, of

course, its literary content. But while the house had fascinated designers from the beginning of the aesthetic movement, their attention had

only gradually turned toward book design. Perhaps it was Rossetti who, by designing bindings for his sister's

Poems (1861), Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (1865), and his own Poems (1881), first showed what might be done to reform the Vic torian book. Whistler, treating his pamphlets as arrangements in black and white, had evolved an idiosyncratic format characterized by very wide margins, an asymmetrical placing of type on the page, and the recurrent use of his butterfly monogram. Walter Crane moved toward

the ideal of decorative unity in a famous series of children's books

by lettering his texts into his drawings so that both text and illustration

might show the same quality of line. Herbert Home and Selwyn Image began employing wood engravings, wide margins, and a Caslon old style type face in the format of The Hobby Horse—the. official

publication of the Century Guild and an important forum for the aesthetic movement. Ricketts was clearly indebted to these early

developments in the printing revival, and Wilde was associated, at least tangentially, with all of them. He admired Rossetti's designs. He was for a time an apt pupil of Whistler's. He cultivated Walter Crane's friendship and persuaded him to illustrate The Happy Prince. He contributed an article on Keats to The Hobby Horse. And when

Emery Walker delivered his famous 1888 lecture on printing to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, the lecture that prompted William Morris to found the Kelmscott Press, Wilde was there to record the occasion

for The Pall Mall Gazette. Wilde was well enough informed on mat ters of book design to sense that a revival of the art was on its way.

Certainly it was long overdue. When Wilde and Ricketts looked backwards at the history of printing, they saw little more than three centuries of steady decline. It was widely agreed that the original sin occurred when printers forsook their roots in the medieval crafts. Ricketts insisted that the first printers

" had only to look back at the



306 Michael Brooks

ancestral forms of letters used by the scribes of the tenth and eleventh centuries to arrive ... at the superior Italian typography of the six teenth century,"6 and Wilde quoted Emery Walker as saying that as

long as handwriting was good " the printers had a living model to go

by, but when it decayed, printing decayed also."7 In the process of

decline, the sturdy, square-shaped letters of the Renaissance were abandoned in favour of the oblong shape and exaggerated contrast between thick and thin strokes of the " new style" faces. Printers became so fond of wide spacing that at times the space between lines of type was as large as the type itself and careless spacing between words permitted rivulets of white to run down the page. Margins grew narrower and printers showed less and less concern with the

quality of their paper. Finally, printers tried desperately to impress by the variety of fancy types employed on a title page or by the

splendour of their illustrations rather than by the carefully achieved

unity of the entire book. Wilde located the chief area of offense when he complained in 1889

of "a discord between our pictorial illustrations and our unpictorial type

" and insisted that " what we need is good book ornament, decora tive ornament that will go with type and printing, and give to each

page a harmony and unity of effect."8 At least three flaws in the art of the Victorian illustrator prevented this unity. The first was his wish to gain imitative, three-dimensional effects in an art better suited to two-dimensional decorative patterns. The second was his inability to harmonize the line of his illustration with that of typography; neither the bank-note engraver's line of Cruikshank nor the freer, more versatile line of Pre-Raphaelite wood engraving could harmonize with the rigidly straight line of type. And beyond these faults lay the

tendency to exalt the illustrator's work until it became almost a fine art, independent of the book that contained it. "This is not right," Ricketts insisted,

" for not every illustration, no matter how admirable it may seem in itself, is suitable as the ornamentation of a book that

0 Charles Ricketts, "

Of Typography and the Harmony of the Printed Page," trans. Richard K. Kellenberger, Colby Library Quarterly, November, 1953, p. 196. The essay was written in French for Luciaen Pissaro's Eragny Press, though plans for its publication in France fell through and it appeared in 1898 under the Vale imprint.

7 Oscar Wilde, "Printing and Printers," The Pall Mall Gazette, Nov. 16, 1888, p. 5.

8 Oscar Wilde, "Some Literary Notes," The Wavian's World, January, 1889, p. 168.



Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricicetts, and the Art of the Book 307

is conceived of in a harmonious fashion. These illustrations, once

properly related to the typographical forms, should constitute in the

setup of the pages that they are to decorate the high note, the luminous

point within the harmony of the page."9 Ricketts' solution lay in a return to the ideals of the Venetian

printers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, he soon found it necessary to imitate Nicholas Jenson and Aldus Manutius by de

signing his own type, for only by doing so could he go beyond the limited resources of a late nineteenth century printing shop and achieve a printed page that would harmonize with the wood engraved illustrations or floral borders. But most of Ricketts' designs for Wilde were accomplished before he began designing type. As a result, even the best of his books of the early nineties suffer from the need for make-shift compromises. He could arrange the typographical resources available to him in new and distinctive formats, but he could not innovate as freely as he did later with his own Vale Press.

That he could nevertheless achieve surprising results is indicated by his design for John Gray's Silver points. It was long thought that this book was commissioned and entirely paid for by Wilde. Professor

James Nelson of the University of Wisconsin has recently discovered that this is not quite so.10 There were in fact two contracts for the

book. In the first, Wilde agreed to pay the costs of publication. In the second, signed a year later, Mathews and Lane agreed to publish the book at their own risk. But although Wilde did not underwrite the book, there is no doubt as to his opinion of its format. In 1894, when Arthur Humphreys proposed an inexpensive edition of his

aphorisms, Wilde replied: "I don't want a 'railway bookstall' book. In England a paper-covered book gets so dirty and untidy: I should like a book as dainty as John Gray's poems by Ricketts."11

One can readily see why Wilde admired this book. Its excessively thin, oblong shape and its cover design of wavy gold lines and gold flames on an olive-green background, gave an air of idiosyncratic decadence. The interior was equally surprising, for each poem was set in small italics to form what Wilde's friend, Ada Leverson, called

"Ricketts, "Of Typography and the Harmony of the Printed Page," p. 198. 10 The information is contained in a letter from Professor James Nelson to the

Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 18, 1969. The matter will also be dealt with

in Professor Nelson's forthcoming study of The Bodley Head. I am grateful to Professor Karl Beckson for drawing my attention to Professor Nelson's letter.




308 Michael Brooks

" the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin."

12 The quaintness was very much an achieved effect, but

the books seems less eccentric when regarded in the light of Ricketts' ideals of book design. He had taken as his model the Italic editions of the poets published by Aldus Manutius in fifteenth century Venice. The use of italics and the wide margins—both based on Aldine practice —permitted Ricketts to escape from the limited variety of available

type faces. The wide margins allowed a more distinguished page design than had hitherto been possible. Even the odd shape of the book has a historical precedent, for Aldus had modelled his volumes after Persian books that had been designed to fit easily into the pocket of a saddle. As so often occurred in the English aesthetic movement, a designer had invoked the golden world of the past in order to achieve a design of striking modernity.

Ill

No partnership between Ricketts and Wilde would have been pos sible had not their agreement on aesthetic principles been supplemented by a deeper emotional kinship, one that permitted Ricketts to express his own talent freely while still remaining within the spirit of Wilde's art. There could be no clearer revelation of this temperamental com

patibility than a comparison of Ricketts' design for A House of Pome granates and the illustrations for Wilde's earlier collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince.

Clearly Wilde expected much from each of these volumes. For the first, he could scarcely have found a more promising collaborator than Walter Crane, an acknowledged leader of the decorative move ment with an international reputation. No less an authority than J.-K.

Huysmans had proclaimed that he could "cite many, many of these ' picture books' signed with his monogram, a crane in a large C, which

deserve a frame more than the huge remnants of wasted canvases, in

gilded wood, each May, covering all the salles de VIndustrie."13 Wilde had the same high expectations for A House of Pomegranates, and Michael Field has recorded his satisfaction in the final design: "He sat down and told us that in his belief our Tragic Mary [designed by Selwyn Image] and Rossetti's Poems were the two beautiful books

12 Oscar Wilde, Letters to the Sphinx, with a memoir by Ada Leverson (London, 1930), p. 19.

13 J.-K. Huysmans, "Le Salon Officiel de 1881," VArt Moderne (Paris, 1883),

p. 213,



Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, And the Art of the Book

(in appearance) of the century—but he was going to surpass us, and would send us an early copy of his Tales, to make us' very unhappy.'"14

The differences between the two books are epitomized in Crane's

rendering of the happy prince (plate I) and Ricketts' title page (plate II). Crane gives us a persuasive descendent of Donatello's St. George, standing on a real pillar, behind which a real city is given in linear

perspective. Ricketts' Pre-Raphaelite maiden, by contrast, lives only partly in the world of real time and real objects; her thoughts are in some infinitely distant, infinitely more enchanting universe. This sense of the remote and mysterious teases us throughout the book, most

notably in the small, circular medallions scattered through its wide

margins. Turning a page, we suddenly see a sparrow pierced by an arrow or a maiden secretively pressing her finger to her lips. Ricketts' distinctive flavour is also felt in the claustrophobic crowding of details and the enigmatic suggestiveness of the woodcuts that begin each tale. A comment of Wilde's, preserved by Michael Field, defines the distinctive flavour of Ricketts' work: "He was delicious on the

illustrations, that are not taken from anything in the book, only sug gested by it—for he holds that literature is more graphic than art, and should therefore never be illustrated in itself, only by what it evokes." 15 Where Crane imitates Wilde's story, Ricketts creates a

visual counterpart to his style.

Though it is Ricketts' freedom from the usual requirements of illus tration that most strikes a modern reader, his contemporaries were

most aware of—and most offended by—his treatment of nature. It was

the front cloth cover of A House of Pomegranates that drew their

wrath. Like the wood engravings inside, the cover design employs natural motifs in a purely stylized, two-dimensional manner: the

wavy linear rhythms of the plant and tree forms contrast with the

stationary outlines of peacock, basket, and fountain. The Saturday Review proclaimed that the peacock looked like "an elderly spinster with her hands behind her back,"16 while The Speaker thought it resembled an " Indian club with a house-painter's brush on the top."17 The Athenaeum complained of the cover's "

ugliness and obscurity " 18

and The Magazine of Art thought that although it was "not ugly 14 Michael Field (pseud, of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Works and

Days (London, 1933), p. 139. 15 Works and Days, p. 139. 16

Anon., The Saturday Review, February 6, 1892, p. 160. 17

Anon., The Speaker, November 28, 1891, p. 648. 18

Anon., The Athenaeum, February 6, 1892, p. 177.



310 Michael Brooks

enough to be fascinating," it was at least " devoid of charm."19 The reviews were stinging enough to provoke a detailed response from Wilde:

. . . the artistic beauty of the cover of my book resides in the delicate tracing, arabesques, and massings of many coral-red lines on a ground of white ivory, the colour-effect culminating in certain high gilt notes, and being made still more pleasur able by the overlapping band of moss-green cloth that holds the book together.

What the gilt notes suggest, what imitative parallel may be found to them in that chaos that is termed Nature, is a matter

of no importance. ... A thing in Nature becomes much lovelier if it reminds us of a thing in Art, but a thing in Art

gains no real beauty through reminding us of a thing in Nature.20

This is a fine and eloquent statement of Wilde's aesthetic viewpoint but, unless it is taken in conjunction with the book it defends, it is

likely to be misunderstood. Nature is everywhere in Wilde's stories: in the flowers of the Infanta's garden who discuss the intruding dwarf as though they were a group of society dowagers and in the dwarf's vow to show the Infanta "all the wind-dances he knew, the mad dance in red raiment with the autumn, the light dance in blue sandals over the corn, the dance with white snow-wreaths in winter, the blossom-dance through the orchards in spring."21 Appropriately, na ture is everywhere in Ricketts' designs as well. It is seen in the flowing plant rhythms of the cloth binding, in the snails, corn, and fluttering quails of the inner binding, in the multitudinous small plants and animals of the wood engravings that decorate the story. But it is never nature taken on her own terms; she is always transformed

according to the dictates of a purely artistic fancy. The same combination of abstract pattern and natural motif is seen

in Poems (1892). John Lane, who had bought the remaining sheets of the fifth edition of Wilde's poems at the bankruptcy sale of David

Bogue's firm and wished to re-issue them under his own imprint, com missioned Ricketts to design a new cover and title page. The cover consists of three tall trees running from top to bottom of the design.

19 Anon., The Magazine of Art, January, 1892, p. 136.

20 The Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 301. 21 Oscar Wilde,

" The Birthday of the Infanta," A House of Pomegranates

(London, 1891), p. 50.




The leafy area of each tree is represented by a single, gracefully curving leaf which contrasts with the ruler-straight lines of the trunk. Ricketts emphasizes the contrast between vertical and rounded lines by setting the rigid stalks of three tall flowers against fantastically curvi linear vine forms. It is no doubt this dual attitude toward nature, in which her motifs are employed in a way that seems quite unnatural, that troubled critics who were otherwise sympathetic to Ricketts' work. Walter Crane, for example, complained of something "weird and strange and even gruesome

"22 in his designs and William Morris said of the first issue of The Dial that "the talent and the aberration of the talent seemed to be in about equal proportions."23 Morris and Crane were the heirs of Ruskin's view that Nature provided man with a moral and aesthetic norm. Ricketts' attitude was closer to Wilde's assertion that Nature has admirable intentions but cannot carry them out.

This casual treatment of nature projects an aura of perversity, an

effect that Ricketts heightens by breaking up the letters of the title and author's name so that they can be scattered among the vine forms

as merely abstract portions of the design. Not surprisingly, Ricketts'

plan for The Portrait of Dorian Gray aims at a similar effect of decadence. Clearly this novel, which Wilde himself called " an essay in the decorative arts,"24 required a distinctive visual form. The white vellum spine gives the title and author's name, but they are cramped into its extreme bottom. The reader who misses the title there would have found it in the top left hand corner of the back cover

in a place where he would never have bothered to look for it. It also

appears on the heather-gray front cover above an inverted pyramid of golden curves and dots. The fact that Ricketts should have chosen

to reproduce hand lettering reveals his dissatisfaction with ordinary type faces and is not without precedent. John Russell Taylor shows that it is derived from Rossetti's lettering style, and ultimately from Blake's.25

Ricketts sought the same effect of luxurious decadence in The

Sphinx, which ranks with Silver-points as one of the masterpieces of his pre-Vale Press work. The House of Pomegranates had not quite matched expectations: a failure in the printing process had reduced

22 Walter Crane, Of The Decorative Illustration of Books (London, 1896), p. 218. "

Quoted in Self-Portrait, p. 20. 24 The Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 264. 21

John Russell Taylor, The Art Noiiveau Book in Britain (London, 1966), p. 75.



312 Michael Brooks

Shannon's illustrations to near invisibility, the ink of Ricketts' wood

engravings lay black and heavy on the page, and the result was a failure of harmony. In The Sphinx, by contrast, there is a masterful union of the elements of the design.

Ricketts' chief problem was the need to spread 174 lines of poetry over 19 pages without letting this attenuated text be overwhelmed

by the illustrations. Accordingly, he abandoned the thick line and multitudinous details of A House of Pomegranates in favour of a

startling severity. He decorated the page as little as possible, using expensive, handmade paper to ensure that the resulting empty spaces would have a pleasing texture. To further guard against the danger that the words would not have enough visual weight to stand up against the drawings, Ricketts took a hint from the Romans and printed the text entirely in capitals. Then, to give a final touch of distinction, he printed the text in three colours—red, brown, and green.

Ricketts also wished to harmonize the style of his drawings with the style of the poem. Since Wilde had ransacked all lands and ages for examples of vice, Ricketts determined that the most appropriate pictorial response would be an elegant eclecticism. Accordingly, he includes an element of Celtic entrelac in the first initial, a hint of

Japanese in the disposition of undecorated spaces, a touch of archaic Greek in the figure drawing, and reminiscences of Blake in the huge megalith construction—recalling the seventieth plate of Jerusalem—of the sixth illustration. The cover perfectly exemplifies the style that Ricketts had forged. A remarkably spare architectural composition, it is divided down the middle into two compartments which house the

sphinx and the poet's muse respectively—the sphinx being presented in an unbearably tense pose and the other contrasting with long, grace ful rhythms. At the top of each compartment are two cabinets—or

perhaps two Japanese sliding panels. One is open and, though nothing about the design suggests three dimensionality, one sees " inside" a

ringing bell. The relation between sphinx and lady, the abstract

handling of three dimensional architecture, the symbolic function of the bell—all of these tease the viewer in the same way that the enigmatic sphinx within fascinates and mystifies the poet.

The illustrations possess the same qualities. Plate III is typical. The contrast between the wavy curls of the water and the rigid trees shows

the virtuosity of Ricketts' line, while the merging of human, organic, and mineral forms (the boyish looking lady on the left is almost part of the rock that supports her and the trees have a rigidity that belies their vegetable nature) illustrates his love of ambiguous effects. The



Plate I: An illustration by Walter Crane for The Happy Prince.



_~z_

hovse

/0/i£^/^wa r£Smb

oscarcwi-ipe

THE DESIGN <Sr DECORATION or THIS

C.PylCKETT^ B00VflyCH SHANNON

7AMC5 KOSQOOD <o~co/v mmlvaine

"OCCCXCi.

Plate II: Title page by Charles Ricketts for A House of Pomegranates.



Plate III: An illustration by Ricketts for The Sphinx.



Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Book

finger-on-the-lips pose of the mysterious lady echoes one of the wood

engravings for The House of Pomegranates and, here at least, may be

prompted by a homosexual reference in the text.

Although Ricketts' eclecticism is appropriate to Wilde's text, there is another sense in which he violates one of its essential characteristics. Wilde delights in sensuous surfaces, as in his concentration on the

tawny throat, silky fur, and " eyes of satin rimmed with gold" of

the sphinx or in his description of Ammon whose "thick soft throat was white and milk and threaded with soft veins of blue."26 Ricketts'

art, because it is severe and linear, introduced an element of tension

and wit into the melodramatic atmosphere of the verse. Wilde must

have recognized this, for his attitude toward the illustrations was com

paratively cool. "No, my dear Ricketts," he said, "your drawings are not of your best. You have seen them through your intellect, not

your temperament."27

LV

On December 5, 1900, Ricketts wrote in his journal: "

[Sturge] Moore brought today the news, some days old, of Oscar's death. I feel too upset to write about it. I know that I have not really felt the fact of his death, I am merely wretched, tearful, stupid, vaguely con scious that something has happened that stirs up the old resentment

and the old sense that one is not sufficiently reconciled to life and death." 28 Personal contacts between Ricketts and Wilde had naturally been infrequent during the years of Wilde's trial, imprisonment, and

exile, but Ricketts' feeling of emotional involvement in Wilde's mis fortunes had been intense. In spite of his own financial difficulties, he had arranged to have one hundred pounds transferred to Wilde's

account as the prison term neared completion, and he had insisted on

visiting Wilde shortly before his release. Wilde cannot have been an

easy man to bear during these last, difficult years. The prison inter view did not go well, and later, when confronted by Ricketts' cover for the author's edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde snapped: " A badly-drawn leaf flung casually on a cover is not a design at all."29 But Ricketts' devotion only grew stronger. Twelve days after learning

28 Lines eight and eighty-nine respectively. 27

Jean Paul Raymond (pseud, of Charles Ricketts), Recollections of Oscar Wilde (London, 1932), p. 38.

28 Self-Portrait, p. 49.




314 Michael Brooks

of Wilde's death, he wrote that he had dreamt of Wilde all night and on December 31st he recorded that Wilde's death, "at first hardly felt," now

" affects one at stray moments, when one is off one's guard:

at sundown, or at sunrise; moments, with me, of introspection, hesi

tation, or regret."30

Inevitably, this intense emotion found expression in Ricketts' art.

Although he had an immensely varied career as a book designer, stage designer, sculptor, and painter, and although he was closely associated with other literary men—notably William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw—he constantly returned to projects associated with Wilde. In 1906 he designed the setting and costumes for a production of Salome—a partial fulfillment of plans he had discussed with Wilde fifteen years earlier. That finished, he began modelling his bronze of Herodias and Salem and later designed a second production—never to be realized—for the long, narrow proscenium of a Japanese stage. At the request of Robert Ross, he designed the very beautiful 1908 uniform edition of Wilde's works. He produced an elaborate set of

designs for Poems in Prose and a second set for The Sphinx. He

prepared a model, now in the Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, for a suggested monument to stand over Wilde's grave; entitled Silence, it repeated the finger-on-the-lips pose of A House of Pome

granates and The Sphinx. "Ricketts is obsessed by the idea that we English persecute the

artist,"31 says one of the characters in the fictional dialogue that

prefaces his Recollections of Oscar Wilde. It was true. Wilde was

the prototype of the persecuted artist and as such he aroused Ricketts'

deepest feelings. In considering Wilde's writings, Ricketts could be

dry and dispassionate, tracing the " passages of poor pathos and tire

some bursts of rhetoric"32 in De Profundis, acknowledging Dorian Gray to be a "poor, early, money making effort," and insisting that it was only in " the very last things, The Soul of Man, Poems in Prose, and Salome, and in The Importance of Being Earnest that he has given a hint of the power of thought, sardonic insight, and wit which char acterized the man himself."33 But as soon as Wilde's tragedy was invoked, Ricketts' deepest feelings crystallized.

" Wilde had been arro

gant, declared himself an artist; he never understood the danger he

""Self-Portrait, p. 50. 31

Recollections of Oscar Wilde, p. 12. 32

Self-Portrait, p. 112. 33

Self-Portrait, pp. 178-79.




was in till he staggered, with the tragic movement of his hand across his eyes, under the horror of the sentence of two years."34 It is no

doubt significant that in one of Ricketts' paintings, Don Juan and the

Equestrian Statue,S5 Don Juan staggers with a similar gesture as the

statue unexpectedly comes alive to demand judgment.

31 Recollections of Oscar Wilde, p. 22. 85 The present location of the painting in unknown. Reproductions of it appear

in T. R. Henn's The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats

(London, 196J) and Charles Ricketts, R.A. (London, 1933).



Documents

Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Book