Charles Robinson Illustrates Oscar Wilde Part III

It is natural for anyone – be they devotee, scholar, aesthete – to turn to an artist’s work to get some sense of the inner man.  Every poem, every painting, any work of prose all spring from some part of the creator, and are aspects of himself. 

This practice, however, is also fraught with peril.  Where does the inner man end and poetic license begin?  Are we to judge Shakespeare, for instance, by the violence of Titus Andronicus and the bleak ending of Romeo and Juliet?  Or by the soaring language and mighty imagination of The Tempest?  Was Zola a degenerate for showing the world Nana, or a great humanist?  And where do we find the real man in an imagination as protean as Oscar Wilde?  Is the real Wilde the man behind The Picture of Dorian Gray?  Or the moralizing comedian of An Ideal Husband?  Or the blood-drenched decadent of Salome?

In the final analysis, we all must create the image of the artist in our mind’s eye, using both the existing work and our own empathy in interpreting it.  Each portrait reveals, as Wilde would say, both the artist and the sitter; to that, I would add it reveals the viewer, as well.

To me, the work which best explains Wilde the man are his two volumes of fairy tales.  These stories are only ostensibly for children; in reality, they are as close to moralizing as the great artist could get and still remain faithful to his own credo of art for art’s sake.  They also bring into stark relief Wilde’s generosity of spirit, his profoundly loving nature, his kindness and his love of language.

Wilde’s prose is often ornate and bejeweled, and this is certainly true in his fairy stories.  Here is more of The Happy Prince:

All the next day he sat on the Prince’s shoulder, and told him stories of what he had seen in strange lands.  He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch gold-fish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels, and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great green snake that sleeps in a palm-tree, and has twenty priests to feed it with honey-cakes; and of the pygmies who sail over a big lake on large flat leaves, and are always at war with the butterflies.

“Dear little Swallow,” said the Prince, “you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women.  There is no Mystery so great as Misery.  Fly over my city, little Swallow, and tell me what you see there.”

So the Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates.

There is no ugliness in Wilde’s interior world; or, if there is, it is a cardinal sin.  To Wilde, beauty was both visible and invisible; though for him, like Gautier, “the visible world existed,” the invisible world was no less real.  Most of his stories for children are warnings against ugliness of spirit or demonstrations that the Philistine is unworthy of the artist.

Artist Charles Robinson, like Wilde, was incapable of ugliness.  The stunning watercolor above shows the beggars near the gates of a beautiful house, wherein the rich make merry.  Many Victorian-era moralists would have made a grittier and more textured image than this: imagine, for instance, what Sir Luke Fildes would have done with this passage.  But Robinson knew what Wilde meant when he wrote you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.  Wilde, who would come to know personal misery, also saw its exalted beauty, because misery is one of the great and inescapable mysteries of our existence.

In Robinson’s illustration, the beggars are huddled in a subdued blue, yellow and ochre light.  The faces are indistinct, but the eyes are hidden in shadow and the noses peek out from within hidden faces.  The figures are drawn in aspects of both supplication and adoration, looking as much like holy pilgrims as hungry people.

Color is also denied these unfortunates.  A garland of blossoms streaks behind the figures, and the greenery and the great house as so set in the background as to be another world.  The great pillar that supports the garland also serves to reinforce the distance between the people in the picture and the warm, comforting background.

Robinson does not rely upon the stylizations of Art Nouveaux here, opting instead for a lyrical realism.  It is an image of great sadness and even greater beauty which is, after all, the point of Wilde’s story.

Awaiting Admission to the Casual Ward by Sir Luke Fildes

One of the most remarkable tricks of time is its habit of turning true hardship into a kind of wistful nostalgia.  Today, readers of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) most often leave with pleasant visual impressions of Fezziwig’s ball, or of the reformed Scrooge spending a glorious Christmas morning walking the streets of Victoria’s London.  This holds true for even the most wrenching parts: the horrid children Ignorance and Want, the privation of the Cratchits, the visitations to prisons and lonely seafaring men, these all acquire a rosy glow in our mind’s eye.

Nothing could be further from Dickens’ intent.  He wrote A Christmas Carol in response to the dreadful conditions of working children throughout the United Kingdom, and with a horror for the current Poor Law and debtors prisons.  None of the wretched encountered by Scrooge should be seen with a twinkle; indeed, a resurrected Dickens would point with shame at the miniscule progress we’ve made in terms of humane and equitable treatment of the world’s poor.  (I can well imagine Dickens, rosy with cold weather and fired with poetry, excoriating the One Percent from the center of Zuccotti Park…)

Few painters better captured the often appalling conditions we fail to recollect in the throes of Victoria-mania than Sir Luke Fildes (1843-1927).  Fields is little remembered or valued today, which is a telling indictment more against the sins of Modernism than it is a critique of his talent.

Fildes entered the Warrington School of Art when he was just 17 years old.  He studied under Frederick Walker, the great leader of the social realist movement in the UK, and was an avid advocate on behalf of the poor and destitute.  He  joined the staff of The Graphic in 1869, using his art to underscore the suffering so commonplace around him. 

Fildes was asked to provide an illustration for an article on the Houseless Poor Act, which provided temporary shelter for the homeless in the casual ward of a workhouse.  The drawing, called Houseless and Hungry, was so accomplished that he set it aside to later turn into a finished painting.

Fellow artist and contributor to The Graphic, John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was so impressed by this picture that he showed the engraving to his friend Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Dickens commissioned Fildes to illustrate The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the artist had finished 12 illustrations when Dickens invited him to his home, Gad’s Hall.  Just as he was about to start the journey, Fildes received word that Dickens had died.

Dickens’ family invited Fildes to come and finish illustrating the book.  While at Gad’s Hall, Fildes drew The Empty Chair, showing Dickens' empty desk and chair.  The drawing was published in the 1870 Christmas edition of The Graphic, and was so widely celebrated that thousands of prints were sold to mourners throughout the realm.

Millais persuaded Fildes that he had the talent and vision to become a serious painter.  He urged Fildes to turn Houseless and Hungry into a painting, along with another drawing done for the Graphic, Fair Quiet and Sweet Rest. 

Houseless and Hungry became Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, finished in 1874.  The picture took the Royal Academy by storm, where it could only hang under police protection from behind a railing.  The picture dramatically illustrated the disparity between rich and poor in the Victorian England, and has lost none of its power to move. 

Casual is an enormous canvas – some nine feet long.  Fildes became quite friendly with several of the homeless who served as models, often inviting them to his home.  It is not simply Fildes’ virtuosity that makes this painting so remarkable, but the unflinching recognition of human suffering and the artist’s empathy for his subjects.  The ragged mother carrying an infant and leading a scruffy child moves forward with her head tilted, as if beaten by both the cold and shame.  Her hand cradles the shawl holding the child, who is completely invisible.

The background figures are remarkable, each individual and with an appreciable story.  There is a neer-do-well with his hands in his pockets, belly out and topper cocked, clearly drunk.  Four children – is the boy a cripple? -- huddle round exhausted parents, the father nearly asleep against the wall as he holds his child.  Even the dog, in the lower left corner, is meager, scrawny and ravaged by disease.

The wall is drab, and the prints on the wall offer no respite from misery as the words Missing and Murder are clearly visible on the handbills.  The gaslight throws no light or warmth and the police officer directs a man on the downward path towards the hell that awaits. 

The triangular composition, stretched-out much like a police line-up, reads almost like a checklist of misery, poverty and despair.  It is one of the most remarkable pictures of its era.

Fildes would later spend much time painting in Venice.  He became a full member of the Royal Academy in 1998 and was knighted in 1906.  His own life was not untouched by tragedy, his son Philip dying of tuberculosis in 1877.

For Fildes, like Dickens, the poor were not props to be pulled out at the Christmas season to provide contrast, and nothing else.  Perhaps we should all take the words of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred to heart, when he said: There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say … Christmas among the rest.  But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round – apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that – as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

There would be no place for a talent like Sir Luke Fildes in our contemporary art scene, which is interested only in stunts and flummery and not an examination of the human condition seen through an artist’s vision.  We are all poorer for it.