Ripe was the Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde by J.E. Chamberlin (review)

HUMANITIES 417 intention is not to toss Elizabeth into the ring of academic debate but to offer book lovers the work of a Pre-Raphaelite as her peers at the Kelmscott Press might have presented it. (DAVID LATHAM) J.E. Chamberlin. Ripe was the Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde Seabury Press 1977. xiii, 212. $15.00 In his study of 'The Age of Oscar Wilde' J.E. Chamberlin sees Wilde and some of his contemporaries as pursuing an ideal of self-development by means of an intensified self-consciousness. Wilde fulfils the injunction to cultivate 'intensely pleasurable sensations' that Pater had proposed in the 1868 essay on the poetry of William Morris - a proposal from which, according to Alan Bellringer, Pater later repeatedly backed away. Chamberlin associates the loss of an Aristotelian idea of character with'a sense' in Wilde and his age 'that the human will is less than fully able to realize its function' (p 58). The 'problem of the will' can be sublimated in art and in the self-aswork -of-art. Hence, Chamberlin associates Wilde's aesthetics with 5chopenhauer's 'advocacy of art as a redemptive pursuit': 'The importance of motive as an ethical function in life and art is diminished, and replaced with an aesthetic function. The motive is to find expression; the motif is the form or controlling function of that expression' (pp 59,114). Taking instruction from the French psychologist Paul Bourget, Chamberlin sees decadence in Wilde as the conscious reflection of a decadent culture. For instance, the 'problem of the will' may be seen as determined by modem urban experience. Decadence, however, is also in part a protest against the reductive impact of environment. This protest may be seen as constructive (individual genius being a mutation necessary to evolutionary progress) or destructive (genius being the most sensitive and articulate, hence the most diSintegrated response to modem conditions ). In either or both guises genius is heroic. By means of stylistic paradox and psychological doubling artists give form to individual and cultural disintegration . This form, though ironic, also yields an ethical meaning that might be redemptive. Chamberlin sees 'the paradox of felix-culpa, the fortunate fall' as 'central to Wilde's genius.' Wilde accepts 'that out of sorrow will come joy' (p 144). In the final chapter Chamberlin opposes decadent images of psychiC autonomy (the androgyne, the dance, St John, and Salome) to images of suffering figures (5t Sebastian, Marsyas, and especially the ChristofRenan: 'one to whom Sorrow and Suffering were modes through which he could realise his conception of the Beautiful,' quoted from Pater, pp 162-3). Chamberlin is not always precise about how closely aspects of Wilde's age are to be associated with Wilde himself. Wilde may be dissociated 418 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 from Schopenhauer as easily as he may be associated with him. Moreover, Chamberlin does not offer readings of such works by Wilde as 'The Soul of Man under Socialism,' 'The Happy Prince,' the plays, or The Picture of Dorian Gray. The readings of Salome and the letters from prison in chapter5 do not provide an adequate basis for a general interpretation. One also wonders about the total soundness of Chamberlin's treatment of will. For instance, he characterizes as a 'romantic infatuation with obsessive self-consciousness' (p 145) Pater's famous reference to 'each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.' But, in context, Pater is referring to the impact of modern psychology on the possibilities of freedom, possibilities that Pater and Wilde both see as paradoxically diminished by scientific and technological progress. Similarly, Chamberlin says little about the late Victorian plutocracy, both symptom and cause of decline as portrayed in novels by Wilde's contemporaries , Anthony Trollope and Henry James. Wilde had an ambivalent relation with this milieu: he exploited it in publicizing himself in the 1880s, but he satirized it in a variety of writings, sometimes scathingly. By playing down these aspects of Wilde Chamberlin undercuts the importance of aestheticism and decadence as a critique of Victorian 'improvement.' Moreover, though he sees Wilde as concerned with general liberation, by the final chapter issues of autonomy move from politics...