Twilight of Dawn

31:1, Book Reviews TWILIGHT OF DAWN Twilight of Dawn: Studies in English Literature in Transition, ed. O M Brack, Jr. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987. $24.95. Twilight of Dawn: Studies in English Literature in Transition edited by O M Brack, Jr., is dedicated to the memory of Helmut E. Gerber, professor of English literature at Arizona State University from 1971 until his death in 1981. Gerber, as readers of ELT know, was also founding editor of English Fiction in Transition in 1957. If individuals can be responsible for anything, Gerber is largely responsible for claiming for the period 1880-1920 an identity of its own, neither the senility of Victorianism nor the puerility of modernism . In his Preface Brack refers to Gerber's hope to synthesize a lifetime of study into a cultural history of the period. Rather than such a synthesis, we have the publication of Gerber's late bibliographical and biocritical projects and this volume, whose essays purport to provide, and do provide, "perceptive insights into a wide variety of literary and other artistic topics" (xiv). The first and longest essay in the book is Ian Fletcher's modestly entitled "Some Aspects of Aestheticism," in which Fletcher attempts no synthesis of aestheticism and indeed finds no coherent representation of it in literature. He traces its early Victorian literary roots in the sublimated Syncretics and Spasmodics ("I've dashed into the seas of metaphor/With as strong paddles as the sturdiest ship/that churns Medusae into liquid light" [6]); through Muscular Christianity's reactions to it, including Charles Kingsley's drawings in which "Kingsley and his wife, at the general resurrection, wing nudely upwards in actual coition" (8); through the Spoonyism of Uranian poets; to the narcissistic and morbid desublimation of the (i.e., Fletcher's) Decadence. Fletcher finds more coherent "aspects" of aestheticism in the visual arts and crafts that satirized its presumed disassociation of art and life and the alleged inhumanity of the artworld. At the height of chinamania in the 1870s one of Punch's small children failing to console her mother for the loss of a favorite pot is turned upon by the aesthetical mama, "You child! You're not unique! ! There are six of you—a complete set" (11). Aesthetic manuals taught such wives and mothers how to transform a home into the House Beautiful. Fletcher quotes at length from Mrs. M. E. Haweis's irresistibly synaesthetic descriptions in Beautiful Houses (1882). Here, in Leighton 's "Narcissus" room, Mrs. Haweis is not so crude as to retell "point-blank, the hackneyed tale," but rather depicts its revelation in color and natural chiaroscuro, in Paterian cadence: Here the walls are deepest sea-blue tiles, that shades make dark; the floor is pallid (the well-known mosaic of the Ceasars' palaces), and casts up shimmering reflected lights upon the greeny-silver ceiling, like water itself. There is something 84 31:1, Book Reviews poetic and original in thus echoing here and there the points in the story of Narcissus—not repeating point-blank the hackneyed tale, or showing the fair boy adoring his mirror'd self in the "lily-paven lake," but just recalling it piecemeal—the lilies in the pavement, the shining lake above, and all the joy and sorrow, the luxury and pain of his loneliness and aberration, told by the colours, the purple and the gloom, and by the boy's own attitude. There is undoubtedly here an imperial stateliness and strength of flavour; and the silence is like a throne. The deep shades of the corners are filled with tarsia work and porcelain; but, as in a well-coloured picture, these are absolutely subservient; and the impression given is purple; like a Greek midnight, circling round a point of softest green (the bronze boy), and falling into a warm grey on the floor. (16) With "Missionary" aestheticism, Fletcher also declines what he calls "sociological " analysis and proposes but to "mention and let fall salient moments" of the Kyrle Society, a philanthropic Society for the Diffusion of Beauty, offering in passing his approval of the Kyrle's "old paternalism": "it was to be succeeded not only by the National Trust...