The Same Old Solotaire

Peter Wollen

• ‘Salome’ and ‘Under the Hill’ by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley
  Creation, 123 pp, £7.95, April 1996, ISBN 1 871592 12 7
• Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque by Chris Snodgrass
  Oxford, 338 pp, £35.00, August 1995, ISBN 0 19 509062 4

Yeats had no doubt how and when the fatal blow was struck. In his memoirs, he noted that ‘the condemnation of Wilde had brought ruin upon a whole movement in art and letters.’ Yeats himself was fortunate that the Celtic Revival, which ran in close tandem with Decadence, had special resources of its own. Two of the great iconic victims of the social purity movement, the repressive engine of Late Victorianism, were themselves Irish – Parnell and Wilde – and Yeats was able to incorporate their tragedies into his heroic narrative of Irish nationalism. Moreover, as Yeats himself pointed out, his own circle – the poets of the Rhymers’ Club – were too marginal to be significantly affected by the Wilde verdict. They only aimed to sell three hundred copies and wrote ‘for the smaller public that has knowledge and is undisturbed by popular feeling’.