0.1 Afterword  (Page 14/25)

Invention and technique arepoised in masterly balance. On purely typographical grounds, one must… note the well-arranged changes of line to suit the type destined to be set with thewoodcut [ sic ]. Thus when the pictures (asin Lord de Tabley’s poems) are inserted as full-page plates, they fulfill a distinctly pictorial convention;…but when (as in The Sphinx ) they are embedded in the text, they are intenselyconventional, and entirely disdain the naturalistic circumstances and intricate workmanship of the earlier book. Yet all the same they equal the earlier fanciesin complexity of idea and intensity of situation. Planted among the type they forbear to arrogate supreme importance to themselves. Although dominating thepage, they do so with a courteous affectation of being merely decorative adjuncts; yet all the time they maintain their dignity unimpaired. In theillustrations to The Sphinx , where the type, sparsely planned to decorate largepages, supplies a modicum of text, the pictures are also in delicate lines, with masses of white to balance and accord with the matter of the book. The merespacing of the pages and the placing of the pictures and text in this one volume…demonstrate the principle of balance and harmony which it is the peculiaraim of Mr. Ricketts to secure. (White, “Work of Charles Ricketts,” 86-91)

For White, Ricketts’s designs for The Sphinx were the embodiment of an artistry of “line,” more commonly associated with Ricketts’s contemporary Aubrey Beardsley,that powerfully expressed “the prodigal imagination brought within the most restrained limits”:

In [The Sphinx] , the main purpose of the imagined poemin line is directly insisted upon, and reiterated without any comments or similes…. To grasp the intention… demands a poetic vision hardly less keenlysustained than that of its author. Such work never has been, and never is likely, to be popular with the multitude. (White, “Work of Charles Ricketts,”83)

White’s important appreciation represents the last serious public engagement with The Sphinx in Wilde’s own lifetime, and it paved the way for a number of scholarly studiesin the 1960s and 1970s that saw The Sphinx as one of the most important and successful examples of art nouveau bookmakingin Britain (see Taylor, Ray and Muir). But if White’s was the last serious engagement in Wilde’s lifetime, mention must be made too of a parodic response, published in Punch shortly after the book’s publication, that squarely foregrounds the subject of gender as no “serious” response was to doeither in Wilde’s lifetime or for many years after. The late-Victorian age was an age of tremendous parodies and caricatures, and one of the best practitionersin this respect was Wilde’s friend the satirist Ada Leverson, whom Wilde dubbed “the Sphinx” in 1892 or 1893 (he first met her in 1892 and was immediately drawnto her wit, intellect, and great personal kindness). See esp. Wilde’s telegram to Leverson of June 1893: “The author of The Sphinx will on Wednesday at two eat pomegranates with the Sphinx of Modern Life” ( Complete Letters , 568). For the life of Ada Leverson, see Violet Wyndham, The Sphinx and her Circle (London: Andre Deutsch, 1963) and Julie Speedie, Wonderful Sphinx: The Biography of Ada Leverson (London: Virago, 1993). Wilde was amused by the satirical sketch of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray that Leverson published anonymously in July 1893 in the satirical magazine Punch (which had a long tradition of satirizingWilde and his fellow Aesthetes). And he was delighted once again when, in July 1894, she took to the pages of Punch afresh to parody The Sphinx . Leverson’s parody, accompanied by a brilliant pen and ink caricature by E. T. Reed ofRicketts’s illustrations, was titled “The Minx – A Poem in Prose.” It took the form of a conversation, modeled closely on the celebrity interviews that werebecoming a conspicuous feature of the so-called New Journalism, between the Poet and The Sphinx: