Introductory Remarks On The Art Of Prophecy

  The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

  For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.

  But in the beginning of the twentieth century the game of Cheat the Prophet was made far more difficult than it had ever been before. The reason was, that there were so many prophets and so many prophecies, that it was difficult to elude all their ingenuities. When a man did something free and frantic and entirely his own, a horrible thought struck him afterwards; it might have been predicted. Whenever a duke climbed a lamp-post, when a dean got drunk, he could not be really happy, he could not be certain that he was not fulfilling some prophecy. In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State. And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age, all quite clear, all quite keen-sighted and ruthless, and all quite different. And it seemed that the good old game of hoodwinking your ancestors could not really be managed this time, because the ancestors neglected meat and sleep and practical politics, so that they might meditate day and night on what their descendants would be likely to do.


  But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the signs of the times.

Excerpt from: Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, London and New York, John Lane – The Bodley Head, 1904.
 

Illustrations by W. Graham Robertson

Oscar Wilde to Elkin Mathews -- 120 Years Ago Today -- 21 November, 1891

John Butler Yeats:  Portrait of Elkin Mathews, 1893, Charcoal and pencil.

TO ELKIN MATHEWS

Ms Princeton

                                                                                                                             29 boulevard des capucines

[postmark 21 November 1891]

Dear Mr Elkin Mathews, I have been in Paris for the last month, and will not be in London for some weeks longer.  With regard to Mr Ricketts, of course he must be paid for his design on its completion.  I mention this as I do not know whether it is on the question of money that he has written to you.  Pray let me know by return what he wanted done.  

     This settled, I will ask Osgood & Mcilvaine to hand you over the copies, and the book could be got out after the rush of Xmas books is over. 

     I think that as the edition will be limited each copy should be signed by the author.  This will give a special character to the edition.  I remain truly yours

                                                                                                                                Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde, Poems. London, Elkin Mathews and John Lane,  1892.

NOTES:

1. Elkin Mathews (John Lane's partner in the Bodley Head bookselling business in Vigo Street, London) published a new edition of Wilde's Poems on May 26, 1892 using and binding unsold sheets of the 5th Bogue edition of 1882.  The work, the first under the joint imprint of Mathews and Lane, was a limited edition of 220 copies, each signed by Wilde, and priced at 15 shillings. 

2.  Wilde received all proceeds from the new edition of the Poems, less five guineas for Charles Ricketts, who designed the title page, half title and cover, five guineas for advertising and the publisher's 20 percent share.

3. Charles de Sousy Ricketts, the Swiss-born English painter, illustrator and theatrical designer, was one of the two well-known illustrators of Oscar Wilde's work.  (Aubrey Beardsley, illustrator of Salome, was the other.)  Ricketts and his life-partner Charles Haslewood Shannon were friends and supporters of Wilde, for whom Ricketts painted, in the style of Clouet, the hero of Wilde's short story The Portrait of Mr W H.  In 1932 Ricketts published the memoir Oscar Wilde:  Recollections under the pseudonym Jean Paul Raymond. 

4.  This letter, like so much of Wilde's correspondence -- whether high-flown or quotidian in subject matter -- reads as though it could have been written yesterday.  I write this as I myself prepare for the "rush of Xmas books," and the rest of the season's scuffle.

5.  Those readers interested in this, might also like This  and  This.

Charles Haslewood Shannon, Portrait of Charles de Sousy Ricketts, 1898, oil on canvas.