Art and Literature

Book Reviews This was a life whose individual phases unfolded like the acts of a drama, combining all elements of the classical tragedy: exposition in Dublin and Oxford, rise and high point in London, fall in the dock at the Old Bailey, and catastrophe in Reading Gaol. The tragic turning-point came with the decision to sue Lord Queensberry. The death of the tragic hero did not in fact follow on directly from the catastrophe, but the source of his inspiration had dried up, and the loss of his artistic creativity was a kind of death in itself. The changes of the plot were accompanied by almost symbolic changes of name: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde rose to the heights of the universally acclaimed Oscar," then fell to the anonymity of C.3.3., and finally in exile hid away under the pseudonym of "Sebastian Melmoth." These last two names were not even his own, but were borrowed—significantly—from a Christian martyr and the hero of Charles R. Maturin's novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Thus the loss of name, the loss of social position and the loss of creativity all went hand in hand, for without an audience Wilde had lost his incentive, without the incentive he lost his art, and without his art he was no longer Oscar. Charles Burkhart Temple University ART AND LITERATURE Carl Woodring. Nature into Art: Cultural Transformations in NineteenthCentury Britain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. 16 plates, xii + 326 pp. $30.00 THAT THE ALLEGIANCE to nature as inspirer of the good, model of the beautiful, and guide to the true which infused EngHsh Hterary and artistic thought in the first decades of the nineteenth century was gradually transmogrified into a celebration of the artful and artificial by the end of the century is weU known. What Carl Woodring offers in Nature into Art is the kind of documentation of the process possible only after decades devoted to study and enjoyment of nineteenth-century English art and Hterature. One result is that those readers with a particular area of interest and famifiarity—the Romantic or Victorian poets, nineteenth-century novelists, the century's controversial prose, the art of Turner or the PreRaphaeUtes or Whistler, the range of nineteenth-century water-colorists, or the history of the mezzotint, etching, and wood-engraving in the century—wiU find their special fields enriched not so much by what is directly said about these but by the total context in which they are placed. Not but that Woodring anticipates readers with a general 85 ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 understanding of the artistic, inteUectual, and literary context. Something more is assumed than the abifity to respond to standard literary, biographical, and artistic allusions and thus recognize the allusion to Tennyson's famous lines in "The time was not yet when nature could be seen as destructive of the type," or know of Lady Hamilton's "Attic attitudes," or visuafize the British Museum's "cosmetic facade." For instance readers wiU find it rewarding to be able to caU up general images (or consult reproductions) of the painting of Claude Lorrain and Gaspard and Nicolas Poussin cited as examples of late-seventeenth century picturesque, or of George Morland as an example of what was thought to be reafistic painting in the early part of the century. It is also useful to be able to bring to one's reading such misceUaneous information as that, for example, wood-engraving—the decHne of which is interestingly reviewed—was important to printers because, unlike the etching or engraving on copper, the wood-engraving could be locked in the same form and printed together with the letter press. One needs to read slowly enough to make the connection that (I assume) the reader is expected to make between the statement of the nineteenth-century situation, "The answer to Darwin was a doctrine of two truths, one of science, another, not subject to disproof, of art," and I. A. Richards's twentieth-century doctrine of the two uses of language. The comment "Wordsworth, for one, knew that vales of Grasmere were rare on distant continents" is intended (I also assume) to remind...