0.1 Afterword  (Page 6/25)

In Wilde’s remarks to his publishers about the poem’s reception, we can detect the emergence of an avant- garde sensibility that would become commonplace among Modernist writers and contributors to the little magazines in the twentieth century. Thissensibility goes back in the nineteenth century at least as far as the 1840s, to the Pre-Raphaelites’ concern for the “Brotherhood” of art and poetry, if notalso to William Blake’s scornful rejection of commercial print media at the turn of the nineteenth century. (Blake combined within himself the roles of poet,artist, printer, and publisher; and he embraced painstaking printing methods that ensured his works were issued, with virtually no publicity, only inextremely limited numbers or even single copies.) But if, like these earlier figures, Wilde felt that books are “delicate and most sensitive things, and ifthey are books worth reading, [they have] a strong dislike of the public”( Complete Letters , 527), he was nonetheless fearful of the reaction with which The Sphinx would be met. “No book of mine…ever goes to the National Observer ” (edited by W. E. Henley), Wilde specified; “I wrote to Henley to tell him so two years ago. He is too coarse,too offensive, too personal…. The St. James Gazette , again, I would not have a copy sent to. They are most scurrilous” ( Complete Letters , 533). Although Wilde had begun composing The Sphinx long before he ever put pen to paper to compose The Picture of Dorian Gray in late 1889, the scandalized reception of his novel in 1890 hangs like a shadow over arrangements for the publication of The Sphinx . Wilde was clearly conscious of the destructive effect English newspaper reviews had had upon Dorian Gray two years earlier, See especially the scathing review of Dorian Gray in the St. James Gazette , dated 20 June 1890 (rpt. in Beckson, 67-71), as well as another by one of W.E. Henley’s minions in the Scots Observer (edited by Henley), dated 5 July 1890 (rpt in Beckson, 74-75). These reviews, alongside other disparagements of Dorian Gray , were republished in Millard, Art and Morality . and he clearly predicted the scurrilous review of The Sphinx that Henley would compose (and print unsigned) in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1894. For these reasons, Wilde is reported to have said that he “hesitated to publish The Sphinx as it would destroy domesticity in England” (quoted in “The City of Books,” 165-66; also in Millard, 399).

In the event, of course, the reverse proved to be the case. Far from destroying domesticity in England, The Sphinx blazed scandalously but briefly across English and Bostonian skies in the summer of 1894 only to fall into a long period of comparativeneglect. This neglect was due in part to the disgrace brought upon Wilde’s work and upon aestheticism generally, in the eyes of many, by Wilde’s imprisonmentfor “gross indecency” in the spring of 1895. For it was Wilde himself who ended up destroyed by English domesticity, an impoverished, nearly broken, manfollowing his release in 1897 from a two-year gaol sentence for sexual “offences” that are now legal in most parts of the English-speaking world andthat are perhaps obscurely hinted at in the perverse imaginings of his greatest poem. Probably for this reason, many accolades have been awarded in the past 112years to Wilde’s oft-anthologized and mournful poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol , composed in the immediate aftermath of his prison experiences, a poem that went into numerouseditions even before Wilde’s death in 1900. But the poem that dominated Wilde’s creative mind in the years running up to his imprisonment, and that in some waysbest embodies the Decadent Movement as a whole, is The Sphinx . Its republication in the form that Wilde personally countenanced is long overdue.