Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

In 1882 J.M.Stoddart, a Philadelphia publisher, issued a slim
volume of poems by Rennell Rodd, Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf*
The verses were printed on the rectos of translucent sheets
of rice paper, backed, for legibility, by interleaves of
stouter, leaf-p;reen stock. The first seventeen pages of text
were devoted to "! 'Envoi" - a prefatory note by Oscar v.'ilde,
who had written to Stoddart:
The preface you v/ill see is most important,
signifying my new departure from Llr.Ruskin
and the Pre-Raphaelites, and marks an era in
the aesthetic movement..
The author of "L*Envoi*1 was lecturing in America, and already
a past-master of haute-vulgarisation:his"new departure" from
Ruskin was chiefly concerned with Oscar Wilde, and Rodd was
favoured with the occasional patronising remark. The essay
gave a comprehensive account of the Aesthetic tei^peraraont,
derived from a variety of masters - notably Pater - and gracefully
dethroning Huskin: he had shown thr.t art is supremely
important in life, for which the new generation must be
thankful, but he had derived its importance wrongly. Art, for
the new temperament, offered an escape from the shallow but
painful experience of the modern world. It was an escape into
the past:
that longing for the old dead days which is
so modern, so incomplete, so touching, being,
in P. way, the inverted torch of Hope, which
burns the hand it should guidej and for many
things a little sadness, and for all things
a great love.p
A clumsy emulation of Pater's cadences is sometimes accompanied
by a re-working of his ideas. Wilde's description of
the much-desired "intensity" of aesthetic feeling is almost
a parody of the Conclusion to Pater's Renaissance, published
nine years previously:
that curious intensity of vision by . hich,
in moments of overmastering: sadness and
despair ungovernable, artistic things v/ill
live in one's memory with a vivid realism
caught from the life ivhich they help one
to forget...^
Such intensity is a me; ns to serenity and "the rer.l gladness
of life", which comes from the "absorption" rather than
rejection of all passion, "and is like that serene calm that